Category Archives: Clock Quotes

In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong, honor that; try to imitate it, and your faults will drop off like dead leaves when their time comes.
– John Ruskin

History doesn’t always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells ‘can’t you remember anything I told you?’ and lets fly with a club.
– John W. Campbell Jr

Sometimes I reflect back on all the beer I have consumed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn’t drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, “It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver.”
– Jack Handy

Turn your midlife crisis to your own advantage by making it a time for renewal of your body and mind, rather than stand by helplessly and watch them decline.
– Jane E. Brody

Tis the reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
– John Updike

Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody.
– Andre Maurois

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us with a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined with a Bonaparte at their head and disposing of all the treasure of the earth, our own excepted, could not by force make a track on the Blue Ridge or take a drink from the Ohio in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up from amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all times, or die by suicide.
– Abraham Lincoln

To divide one’s life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.
– Clifton Fadiman

Remembrance, like a candle, burns brightest at Christmas Time.
– Charles Dickens

Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time for Christmas.
– Johnny Carson

Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.
– John Calvin Coolidge

Christmas is a bridge. We need bridges as the river of time flows past. Today’s Christmas should mean creating happy hours for tomorrow and reliving those of yesterday.
– Gladys Taber

Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want – and their kids pay for it.
– Richard Lamm

She played Bach. I do not know the names of the pieces, but I recognized the stiff ceremonial of the frenchified little German courts and the sober, thrifty comfort of the burghers, and the dancing on the village green, the green trees that looked like Christmas trees, and the sunlight on the wide German country, and a tender cosiness; and in my nostrils there was a warm scent of the soil and I was conscious of a sturdy strength that seemed to have its roots deep in mother earth, and of an elemental power that was timeless and had no home in space.
– W. Somerset Maugham

I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day. We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year. As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year.
– David Grayson

Once upon a time – of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve – old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house.
– Charles Dickens

The invention of the teenager was a mistake, in Miss Manners’ opinion…. Once you identify a period of life in which people have few restrictions and, at the same time, few responsibilities – they get to stay out late but don’t have to pay taxes – naturally, nobody wants to live any other way.
– Judith Martin

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
– Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916)

Anytime I’ve gone to a movie for a first date, it’s been bad.
– Tom Everett Scott

We’re a sentimental people. We like a few kind words better than millions of dollars given in a humiliating way. (Refusing economic aid from the West)
– Gamal Abdel Nasser

Bringing up teenagers is like sweeping back ocean waves with a frazzled broom – the inundation of outside influences never stops. Whatever the lure – cars, easy money, cigarettes, drugs, booze, sex, crime – much that glitters along the shore has a thousand times the appeal of a parent’s lecture.
– Mary Ellen Snodgrass

When the leadership is right and the time is right, the people can always be counted upon to follow – to the end at all costs.
– Harold J. Seymour

Sometimes we want to get away from the busy and hectic city life to find solace in the raging waves of the ocean pounding on the rocks or the turbulent splashing of a bubbling waterfall. At other times we are amazed by the immovable silence of a mountain
– Stuti Garg

If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.
– Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

I guess you will have to go to jail. If that is the result of not understanding the Income Tax Law I shall meet you there. We shall have a merry, merry time, for all of our friends will be there. It will be an intellectual center, for no one understands the Income Tax Law except persons who have not sufficient intelligence to understand the questions that arise under it.
– Senator Elihu Root

Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once, and so there will be no unity and completeness.
– Aristotle

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
– Paul Ambroise Valery

One reason I don’t drink is because I wish to know when I’m having a good time.
– Nancy Astor

For us who live in cities Nature is not natural. Nature is supernatural. Just as monks watched and strove to get a glimpse of heaven, so we watch and strive to get a glimpse of earth. It is as if men had cake and wine every day but were sometimes allowed common bread.
– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Each time we re-read a book we get more out of it because we put more into it; a different person is reading it, and therefore it is a different book.
– Muriel Clark

There is no fence or hedge round time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.
– Richard Llewellyn

Some say no evil thing that walks by night,
In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen,
Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost
That breaks his magic chains at curfew time,
No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine,
Hath hurtful power o’er true virginity.
– John Milton

It’s life isn’t it? You plow ahead and make a hit. And you plow on and someone passes you. Then someone passes them. Time levels.
– Katharine Hepburn

Madness is consistent, which is more than can be said of poor reason. Whatever may be the ruling passion at the time continues so throughout the whole delirium, though it should last for life. Our passions and principles are steady in frenzy, but begin to shift and waver as we return to reason.
– Lawrence Sterne

A poor surgeon hurts one person at a time. A poor teacher hurts thirty.
– Ernest Leroy Boyer

There is no royal road to anything. One thing at a time, all things in succession. That which grows fast, withers as rapidly. That which grows slowly, endures.
– Josiah Gilbert Holland

Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
– Rabbinic Saying

A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.
– Jean Paul Richter

Who says we didn’t have controversial subjects on TV back in my time? Remember Bonanza? It was about three guys in high heels living together.
– Milton Berle

The next time you feel like complaining, remember that your garbage disposal probably eats better than thirty percent of the people in this world.
– Robert Orben

Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader’s daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
– John le Carre

Already the writers are complaining that there is too much freedom. They need some pressure. The worse your daily life, the better your art. If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship, this pressure produces diamonds.
– Tatyana Tolstaya

Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom.
– John Fitzgerald Kennedy

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side … when the glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time … is a very good one.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
– James Matthew Barrie

I had been practicing for the Depression a long time. I wasn’t involved with loss. I didn’t have money to lose, but in common with millions I did dislike hunger and cold.
– John Steinbeck

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species – man – acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.
– Rachel Carson

There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me – I always feel that they have not said enough.
– Mark Twain

While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.
– Lee De Forest