Philosophy on time

“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.”

“To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”

“Those who need myths are indeed poor. Here the gods serve as beds or resting places as the day races across the sky.”

“What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.”

“Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.”

“The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.”

“Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.”

“Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.”

“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.”

“An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”

“And now, at half-past ten o'clock, I hear the cockerels crow in Hubbard's barns, and morning is already anticipated. It is the feathered, wakeful thought in us that anticipates the following day.”

“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answered that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

“Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.”

“A spurious axiom of the first class is: Whatever is, is somewhere and sometime.”

“All that time is lost which might be better employed.”

“Days of absence, sad and dreary, / Clothed in sorrow's dark array,—Days of absence, I am weary: She I love is far away.”

“To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.”

“If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.”

“I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.”

“I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.”

“Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.”

“If pains be to be taken to give him a manly air and assurance betimes, it is chiefly as a fence to his virtue when he goes into the world under his own conduct.”

“Since before time and space were, the Tao is. It is beyond is and is not. How do I know this is true? I look inside myself and see.”

“A violent wind does not outlast the morning; a squall of rain does not outlast the day. Such is the course of Nature. And if Nature herself cannot sustain her efforts long, how much less can man!”

“Block the passages, shut the doors, And till the end your strength shall not fail. Open up the passages, increase your doings, And till your last day no help shall come to you.”

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

“We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.”

“One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand popular feeling and to give expression to it; another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments; and the third is fearlessly to expose popular defects.”

“Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.”

“There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and never return. (Hays translation)”

“Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.”

“How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.”

“You're better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve. (Hays translation)”

“All is ephemeral — fame and the famous as well.”

“Irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in unproductive moments. In productive ones try to make use of it as one more means of seizing life.”

“He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.”

“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”

“Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.”

“Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.”

“No man has ever been so far advanced by Fortune that she did not threaten him as greatly as she had previously indulged him.”

“I commend you and rejoice in the fact that you are persistent in your studies, and that, putting all else aside, you make it each day your endeavour to become a better man.”

“If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.”

“It is indeed foolish to be unhappy now because you may be unhappy at some future time.”

“It is disgraceful, instead of proceeding ahead, to be carried along, and then suddenly, amid the whirlpool of events, to ask in a dazed way: How did I get into this condition?”

“It is the quality of a great soul to scorn great things and to prefer that which is ordinary rather than that which is too great.”

“No man ought to glory except in that which is his own.”

“You will have less money. Yes, and less trouble. Less influence. Yes, and less envy.”

“And now that the hour of departure is appointed to me, this is the hope with which I depart, and not I only, but every man that believes that he has his mind purified.”

“What is asked of a man that he may be able to pray for his enemies? To pray for one's enemies is the hardest thing of all. That is why it exasperates us so much in our present day situation.”

“Concepts, like individuals, have their histories, and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals.”

“A naturall foole that could never learn by heart the order of numerall words, as one, two, and three, may observe every stroak of the Clock, and nod to it, or say one, one, one; but can never know what houre it strikes.”

“For Prudence, is but Experience; which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.”

“Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.”

“If I had had more time, this letter would have been shorter.”