Category Archives: Clock Quotes

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
– Elwyn Brooks White

People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
– Neil Postman

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
– Oscar Wilde

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.
– George Orwell

Youth is the best time to be rich; and the best time to be poor.
– Euripides

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
– Hector Berlioz

These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget. But they have no slow, big ideas.
– Brenda Ueland

Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.
– Learned Hand

He who is shipwrecked the second time cannot lay the blame on Neptune.
– English proverb

I have come to the conclusion that the 22nd Amendment [limiting the presidency to two terms] was a mistake. Shouldn’t the people have the right to vote for someone as many times as they want to vote for him?
– Ronald Wilson Reagan
[Please don’t forward this to W!]

People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway.
– Simeon Strunsky

Persistence is the twin sister of excellence. One is a matter of quality; the other, a matter of time.
– Marabel Morgan

If a person gives you his time, he can give you no more precious gift.
– Frank Tyger

A man may fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame someone else.
– Knox Manning

Time – our youth – it never really goes, does it? It is all held in our minds.
– Helen Hoover Santmyer

The ability to concentrate and use time well is everything.
– Lido Anthony Iacocca

Other people’s interruptions of your work are relatively insignificant compared with the countless times you interrupt yourself.
– Brendan Francis

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
– Steven Wright

You are … the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does.
– Dag Hammarskjold, 1905 – 1961

We cannot hold a torch to light another’s path without brightening our own.
– Ben Sweetland

She would rather light candles than curse the darkness and her glow has warmed the world.
– Adlai Ewing Stevenson, regarding Eleanor Roosevelt

Begin today! No matter how feeble the light, let it shine as best it may. The world may need just that quality of light which you have.
– Henry C. Blinn

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.
– Karl Kraus, 1874 – 1936

It was both odd and unjust…a real example of the pitiful arbitrariness of existence, that you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-a-vis the future.
– Daniel Kehlmann, in ‘Measuring the World’ (hat-tip: Benjamin Cohen)

Sometimes I need what only you can provide – your absence.
– Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant

I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.
– Jennifer Unlimited

All great achievements require time.
– David Joseph Schwartz

All human power is a compound of time and patience.
– Honore de Balzac

To live is so startling it leaves time for little else.
– Emily Dickinson

Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within sleep.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

To those who sweat for their daily bread leisure is a longed-for sweet until they get it.
– John Maynard Keynes

Sleep that knits up the ravel’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
– William Shakespeare

I hate it when my foot falls asleep during the day cause that means it’s going to be up all night.
– Steven Wright

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
– William Carlos Williams

The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.
– Herb Caen

Our theological Church, as we know, has scorned and vilified the body til it has seemed almost a reproach and a shame to have one, yet at the same time has credited it with the power to drag the soul down to perdition.
– Eliza Farnham

No one from the beginning of time has had security.
– Eleanor Roosevelt

The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.
– H. R. Trevor-Roper

I wake to sleep,
and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
– Theodore Roethke

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.
– Horace Greeley

Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
– Henry Louis Mencken

It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.
– Henry James

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
– George Bernard Shaw

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.
– Mark Twain

Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.
– Joel Barker

Time will explain it all. He is a talker, and needs no questioning before he speaks.
– Euripides

Until the 20th century, few people needed money. Apart from salt and iron, everything could be paid for in kind. Economic activity was more a means of making the time pass than of making money, which might explain why one of the few winter industries in the Alps was clock-making. Tinkering with tiny mechanisms made time pass less slowly, and the clocks themselves proved that it was indeed passing.
– Graham Robb [N.Y.Times, November 25, 2007]
Hat-tip: Selva

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
– Albert Einstein

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
– Agatha Christie