Other Thoughts on Time
In doing my research on time, I wanted to know more about how people reflect on the passage of time. I perused some of the online quote sites like Bartleby.com and assembled a small list. Here are some of the better entries from that list….
Never the time and the place
And the loved one all together!
Never the Time and the Place.
Robert Browning (1812–1889)
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
T.S. Eliot
Time and I against any two.
Spanish proverb
Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
Thomas Mann
A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.
T.S. Eliot
Time, as is well known, sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes crawls like a worm, but human beings are generally particularly happy when they don’t notice whether it’s passing quickly or slowly.
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
Time will explain it all. He is a talker, and needs no questioning before he speaks.
Euripides
Time is the image of eternity.
Plato
Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.
William Shakespeare
The bell strikes one. We take no note of time
But from its loss.
Edward Young
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.
Benjamin Franklin
If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not.
William Shakespeare
Time rushes by and yet time is frozen. Funny how we get so exact about time at the end of life and at its beginning. She died at 6:08 or 3:46, we say, or the baby was born at 4:02. But in between we slosh through huge swatches of time—weeks, months, years, decades even.
Helen Prejean
Any others you’d like to add?
sean@cheesebikini.com said,
October 13, 2002 @ 1 am
“When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver’s watch… they identified it immediately as the god he worshipped. After all, ‘he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action of his life.’ To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We’re all Gullivers now.
Or are we Yahoos?”
-James Gleick in Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
Fabrizio Ulisse said,
October 14, 2002 @ 3 am
How do you like a classical point of view from my country?
“E però, quando s’ode cosa o vede
che tegna forte a sé l’anima volta,
vassene ’l tempo e l’uom non se n’avvede”
“And hence, whenever aught is heard or seen
Which keeps the soul intently bent upon it,
Time passes on, and we perceive it not”
Dante Alighieri - Divina Commedia (Purgatorio, Canto IV)
Amy Ferchak said,
October 24, 2002 @ 1 am
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost - New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes
sean@cheesebikini.com said,
October 25, 2002 @ 8 pm
Here’s a good episode of the radio show Studio 360 about time, science and art. It revolves around a discussion between the host and Alan Lightman, the physicist who wrote Einstein’s Dreams:
http://www.wnyc.org/studio360/show101202.html
Eric Scheid said,
November 29, 2002 @ 4 am
I’ve lost the online reference to an interesting piece of ethnographic/mind research: In the west we think of time moving, and moving forward at that. In China, they think of time moving downwards.
Marc Rettig said,
December 8, 2002 @ 5 pm
If you’re researching time, you might like the book I’m currently reading on the train back and forth to Chicago every day.
Robert Levine, A geography of time: the temporal misadventures of a social psychologist.
For some reason I can’t find it on amazon. But ask google about it, and you’ll find reviews.
Not exactly a poetic post, but… oh, here. I have something for you from a collection of “Quake haiku” — haiku written by people who play the PC game Quake (I know, I know).
http://www.planetquake.com/que/haiku/haiku.htm
It is five o’ clock
time to play a little Quake
What the hell?! It’s ten!
Noman said,
January 5, 2004 @ 10 am
Is this trite so every one missed it?
Time and Tide wait for no man.