Category Archives: Clock Quotes

Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
– Douglas Noel Adams

It is quite hard at times to distinguish a genius from a lunatic.
– Dorothy Thompson

Is freedom anything else than the power of living as we choose? Nothing else. Tell me then, you men, do you wish to live in error? We do not. No one who lives in error is free. Do you wish to live in fear? Do you wish to live in sorrow? Do you wish to live in tension? By no means. No one who is in a state of fear or sorrow or tension is free, but whoever is delivered from sorrows or fears or anxieties, he is at the same time also delivered from servitude.
– Epictetus

What can be done at any time is never done at all.
– English Proverb

Procrastination is the thief of time.
– Edward Young

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one’s whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of “all the little emptiness of love.”
– Ellen Glasgow

You have to recognize when the right place and the right time fuse and take advantage of that opportunity. There are plenty of opportunities out there. You can’t sit back and wait.
– Ellen Metcalf

It ever has been since time began, And ever will be, till time lose breath, That love is a mood – no more – to a man, And love to a woman is life or death.
– Ella Wheeler Wilcox

We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.
– Elizabeth II

You may search my time-worn face, You’ll find a merry eye that twinkles. I am NOT an old lady, just a little girl with wrinkles.
– Edythe E. Bregnard

Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
– Eliezer Wiesel

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Two things are aesthetically perfect in the world – the clock and the cat.
– Emile Auguste Chartier

Here we see how potent has been the effect of the introduction of a single tree, nothing whatever else having been done, with the exception that the land had been enclosed so that cattle could not enter. But how important an enclosure is, I plainly saw in Farnham, in Surrey. Here there are extensive heaths, with a few clumps of old Scotch firs on the distant hill tops: within the last ten years large spaces have been enclosed, and self-sown first are now springing up in multitudes, so close together that all cannot live.
– Charles R. Darwin, Origin of Species, p.123
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Hat-tip: Tom.

A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.
– Charles R. Darwin
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…it is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
– Charles R. Darwin
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Doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.
– Charles R. Darwin
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As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.
– Charles R. Darwin
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…doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.
– Charles R. Darwin
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The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?
– Charles R. Darwin
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The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.
– Charles R. Darwin
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If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
– Charles R. Darwin
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Without speculation there is no good and original observation.
– Charles R. Darwin
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I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.
– Charles R. Darwin
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On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: “An unbeliever . . . might exclaim ‘Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work'”
– Charles R. Darwin
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I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follow[s] from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biassed by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.
– Charles R. Darwin, 1958. The autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882
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As for myself I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to Science. I feel no remorse from having committed any great sin, but have often and often regretted that I have not done more direct good to my fellow creatures. My sole and poor excuse is much ill-health and my mental constitution, which makes it extremely difficult for me to turn from one subject or occupation to another. I can imagine with high satisfaction giving up my whole time to philanthropy, but not a portion of it; though this would have been a far better line of conduct.
– Charles R. Darwin, 1958. The autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882
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Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.
– Charles R. Darwin
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I love fools experiments. I am always making them.
– Charles R. Darwin
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Happy Valentine’s Day!

Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system- with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
– Charles R. Darwin
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..and much, much more…

Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.
– Charles R. Darwin
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..and much, much more…

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
– Charles R. Darwin
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..and much, much more…

I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it.
– Charles R. Darwin
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The plough is one of the most ancient and most valuable of mans inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly ploughed, and still continues to be thus ploughed by earth-worms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures.
– Charles R. Darwin
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Thanks Michael Barton for today’s quote.

It has been a bitter mortification for me to digest the conclusion that the ‘race is for the strong’ and that I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in science.
– Charles R. Darwin
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Here, poor Forbes made a continent to N. America & another (or the same) to the Gulf of
weed. – Hooker makes one from New Zealand to S. America & round the world to
Kerguelen Land. Here is Wollaston speaking of Madeira & P. Santo “as the sure &
certain witnesses” of a former continent. Here is Woodward writes to me if you grant a
continent over 200 or 300 miles of ocean-depths (as if that was nothing) why not extend a
continent to every island in the Pacific & Atlantic oceans! And all this within the
existence of recent species! If you do not stop this, if there be a lower region for the
punishment of geologists, I believe, my great master, you will go there. Why your
disciples in a slow & creeping manner beat all the old catastrophists who ever lived. –
You will live to be the great chief of the catastrophists!
– Charles R. Darwin, in a letter to Lyell (1856),
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A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
– Charles R. Darwin,
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To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.
– Charles R. Darwin,
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I believe from what I have seen Humboldts glorious descriptions are & will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies & the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth. The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind … The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise. — I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another Sun illumines everything I behold.
– Charles R. Darwin,
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We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe[s,] to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.
– Charles R. Darwin,
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I have called this principle, by which, each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
– Charles R. Darwin, The Origin of Species (ch. III)
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One world at a time.
– Henry David Thoreau

A physician can sometimes parry the scythe of death, but has no power over the sand in the hourglass.
– Hester Lynch Piozzi

I’m most at home on the stage. I was carried onstage for the first time when I was six months old.
– Alan Alda

All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.
– Woody Allen

‘Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world.
– William Shakespeare

The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.
– Abraham Lincoln

You have played enough; you have eaten and drunk enough. Now it is time for you to depart.
– Horace

Sometimes when learning comes before experience It doesn’t make sense right away.
– Richard David Bach