quotes, quotations and nice thoughts on time

The time to relax is when
you don’t have the time for it.

Sydney J. Harris

We cannot separate our lives from time. Why is it that we are so extravagant, so thoughtless, in our waste of time, especially in youth, when we cling so tenaciously to life? You cannot separate a wasted hour from the same duration of your life. If you waste your time, you must waste your life. If you improve your time, you cannot help improving your life. Orison Swett Marden The Joys of Living

Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can’t buy more hours. Scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow. Success depends upon using it wisely—by planning and setting priorities. Denis Waitley

Wise people know what time it is in their own lives and in the life of the community. They know that sensing the kairos (the prepared or ripe moment) is more important than conforming to the compulsive rhythm of chronological time. Thus, wise people are able to give themselves gracefully to seemingly contradictory experiences because they know that they belong to different seasons of life, all of which are necessary to the whole. Spring and winter, growth and decay, creativity and fallowness, health and sickness, power and impotence, and life and death all belong within the economy of being. Sam Keen

Time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once. unattributed

It is a strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow
of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. It can
be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that
the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people
of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely
for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people,
but for the appalling silence of the good people.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

quotations - contents - welcome page - obstacles
our current e-zine - the people behind the words - articles and excerpts
Daily Meditations, Year One - Year Two - Year Three - Year Four

Sign up for your free daily spiritual or general quotation ~ ~ Sign up for your free daily meditation

One who is afraid of time becomes a prey of time.
But time itself becomes a prey of that one who is not afraid of it.

Nisargadatta

The need to make wise choices encompasses every area of our
lives. Since we have time for only a limited amount of stuff,
we need to choose wisely what stuff we're going to allow to
take up that time. Since we have only a limited amount of time
to spend with friends or to engage in leisure activities, we
need to choose our friends and our activities wisely.

Elaine St. James

Minutes are worth more than money. Spend them wisely.

Thomas P. Murphy

Waste of time is the most extravagant and costly of all expenses.

Theophrastus

How you spend your time is more important than how you spend your money. Money mistakes can be corrected, but time is gone forever.

David Norris

Time is your greatest advisor. Time will tell you if you can waste your life
in illusion and fantasy thoughts, dwelling over past regrets and future
apprehensions. Just ask time, and time will point
out that there are no survivors.

A Spiritual Warrior

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who
fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those
who rejoice; but for those who love, time is eternity.

Henry van Dyke

Many of us cannot grasp the truth that the time allotted to us
on this earth is sufficient for all the Lord has planned for us to do.
We don’t need one minute more or one minute less to get the job done:
Our greatest fear is running out of time. So we hurry through life
trying desperately to get everything done: working overtime, eating
fast food in the car, and racing down the freeway. . . . Today, this
very day, why don’t you think of something that takes a bit of extra
time to do and do it. . . . Maybe it will be an act of generosity or a
moment of kindness directed towards a loved one or a stranger.
Perhaps it will be simply singing a hymn of praise and thanksgiving
because your heart is so full of gratitude. Don’t wait for another
time. Rejoice in this day and be glad.

Luci Swindoll

Know the true value of time! Snatch, seize, and enjoy every
moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

Philip Chesterfield

Those who make the worst use of their time are
the first to complain of its shortness.

Jean La Bruyere

Everything is flowing. The Great River of Time takes everything
with it, and nothing in this world remains unchanged or stabilized.

Mouni Sadhu

We talk about saving time and killing time when actually
we can't do either. We have no choice but
to spend it at a constant and flowing rate.

Michael LeBeouf

God created time and gave it to us. It is his fundamental gift,
for all other gifts are conditioned upon it. Why should we give
it so grudgingly to his service? Why should we not lavish time
upon the things that God knows and we know are vital things?

E.A. Rountree

What is time? The shadow on the dial, the striking of the clock,
the running of the sand, day and night, summer and winter, months,
years, centuries--these are but arbitrary and outward signs,
the measure of Time, not Time itself. Time is the Life of the Soul.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Years should be nothing to you. Who asked you to count them
or consider them? In the world of wild Nature, time is measured
by seasons only--the bird does not know how old it is--the
rose-tree does not count its birthdays!

Marie Corelli

Time mellows people as it mellows wine, as long as the grapes are good.
You may set out to be a businesswoman or businessman but in the
course of time end up caring for a dying parent, orphaned niece,
or disabled brother. You may encounter illness yourself and end up
being a writer, touching the heartstrings, not the purse strings
of other people. That’s why it’s best to always be true to yourself
and God and to be flexible within His will. He will use you.

Barbara Johnson

It is never a waste of time to be outdoors, and never a waste of time
to lie down and rest even for a couple of hours. It is then that images
float up and then that I plan my work. But it is a waste of time to see
people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every
effort to find out the real person, but if I can’t, then I am upset
and cross. Time wasted is poison.

May Sarton
Journal of a Solitude

Articles and book excerpts on time:

You May Not Know What Really Matters      Elaine St. James
Start Living in Prime Time      Denis Waitley
Practical Time Management Tips      Tony Murtaugh

Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, and affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.

You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. . . . No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.

In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. . . . Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.

I have said the affair was a miracle. Is it not?

You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness--the elusive prize that you are clutching for, my friends--depends on that.

If one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle one's whole life indefinitely.

We shall never have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.

Arnold Bennett

Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is
no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the
cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants,
a world without clocks or seasons or promises.

Ursula K. LeGuin

Time is not a road--it is a room.

John Fowles

Was then not all sorrow in time, all self-torment and fear in time?
Were not all difficulties and evil in the world conquered as soon as
one conquered time, as soon as one dispelled time?

Hermann Hesse

We have some inspiring and motivational books that may interest you. Our main way of supporting this site is through the sale of books, either physical copies or digital copies for your Amazon Kindle (including the online reader). All of the money that we earn through them comes back to the site in one way or another. Just click on the picture to the left to visit our page of books, both fiction and non-fiction!

Beginningless time and the present moment are the same. . .
You have only to understand that time has no real existence.

Huang-po

Rightly conceived, time is the friend of all who are in any way in
adversity, for its mazy road winds in and out of the shadows
sooner or later into sunshine, and when one is at its darkest
point one can be certain that presently it will grow brighter.

Arthur Bryant

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can
determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.

Carl Sandberg

I lived when simply waiting was a large part of ordinary life: when we waited, gathered around a crackling radio, to hear the infinitely far-away voice of the king of England. . . . I live now when we fuss if our computer can't bring us anything we want instantly. We deny time. We don't want anything to do with it, we want to erase it, deny that it passes. What is time in cyberspace? And if you deny time, you deny space. After all, it's a continuum-- which separates us.
So we talk on a cell phone to people in Indiana while jogging on the beach without seeing the beach, and gather on social media into huge separation-denying disembodied groups while ignoring the people around us. I find this virtual existence weird, and as a way of life, absurd. This could be because I am eighty-four years old. It could also be because it is weird, an absurd way to live.

Ursula K. LeGuin

Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the
year as you make use of. One person gets only a week’s value out of
a year while another person gets a full year’s value out of a week.

Charles Richards

Time isn't a commodity, something you pass around like cake. Time
is the substance of life. When anyone asks you to give
your time, they're really asking for a chunk of your life.

Antoinette Bosco

It is good to be back on a schedule. Norton will publish a new book of poems
to celebrate my sixtieth birthday next spring. I must have the manuscript in their
hands by the end of September. As soon as I have a deadline,
I work much better. Time unbounded is hard to handle.

May Sarton
Journal of a Solitude

They who every morning plan the transactions of the day and follows out
that plan carry a thread that will guide them through the labyrinth
of the most busy life. . . if the disposition of time is surrendered
merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.

Victor Hugo

An Italian philosopher said that "time was his estate"; an estate indeed which
will produce nothing without cultivation, but will always abundantly repay the
labors of industry, and generally satisfy the most extensive desires, if no part
of it be suffered to lie in waste by negligence, to be overrun with
noxious plants, or laid out for show rather than for use.

Samuel Johnson

Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched
by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you've wasted
in the past, you still have an entire today. If you've just frittered away an
hour procrastinating, you will still be given the next hour to start on priorities.
Time management contains one great paradox: No one has enough time,
and yet everyone has all there is. Time is not the problem; the
problem is separating the urgent from the important.

Denis Waitley

To live means to experience--through doing, feeling, thinking.
Experience takes place in time, so time is the ultimate scarce
resource we have. Over the years, the content of experience
will determine the quality of life. Therefore one of the most
essential decisions any of us can make is about how one's
time is allocated or invested.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi