Category Archives: Clock Quotes

We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too late to ask where we are going.
– Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
– Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket, and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one. If you are asked what o’clock it is, tell it, but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman.
– Lord Chesterfield

Grad school is the snooze button on the clock-radio of life.
– John Rogers

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

I loathe the expression ‘What makes him tick’ … A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
– James Thurber

It is all right for the lion and the lamb to lie down together if they are both asleep, but if one of them begins to get active it is dangerous.
– Crystal Eastman

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of “work”, because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do…. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.
– Andy Warhol

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
– Rene Descartes

When the tea is brought at five o’clock
And all the neat curtains are drawn with care,
The little black cat with bright green eyes
Is suddenly purring there.
– Harold Monro

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
– Franois Marie Arouet (Voltaire)

The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for Nature to follow. Now we just set the clock an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.
– Elwyn Brooks White

No Time, spoke the clocks, no God, rang the bells,
I drew the white sheet over the islands
And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells.
– Dylan Thomas

A minister has to be able to read a clock. At noon, it s time to go home and turn up the pot roast and get the peas out of the freezer.
– Garrison Keillor

I work until beer o’clock.
– Stephen King

When late morning rolls around and you’re feeling a bit out of sorts, don’t worry; you’re probably just a little eleven o’clockish.
– Alan Alexander Milne

Sleep, to the homeless thou art home; the friendless find in thee a friend.
– Ebenezer Elliott

There is a time for some things, and a time for all things; a time for great things, and a time for small things.
– Miguel de Cervantes

I am long on ideas, but short on time. I only expect to live about a hundred years.
– Thomas Alva Edison

Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.
– Theophrastus

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
– Thomas Carlyle

The great omission in American life is solitude. . . that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incinerator of the spirit.
– Marya Mannes

Our perception that we have “no time” is one of the distinctive marks of modern Western culture.
– Margaret Visser

The days are too short even for love; how can there be enough time for quarreling?
– Margaret Gatty

The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on their first flight are hardly so hovered around.
– Georges Bernanos (1888-1948)

The practical success of an idea, irrespective of its inherent merit, is dependent on the attitude of the contemporaries. If timely it is quickly adopted; if not, it is apt to fare like a sprout lured out of the ground by warm sunshine, only to be injured and retarded in its growth by the succeeding frost.
– Nikola Tesla

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
– Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx

When you’re following your energy and doing what you want all the time, the distinction between work and play dissolves.
– Shakti Gawain

Ah, Faustus, now hast thou but one bare hour to live
And then thou must be damn’d perpetually!
Stand still, you ever moving spheres of heaven.
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair nature’s eye, rise, rise again and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
‘O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!’
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come and Faustus must be damn’d’
The tragical History of Dr Faustus, Philip Marlowe, 1604
(Thanks to Peter for this quote)

In a world where the time it takes to travel (supersonic) or to bake a potato (microwave) or to process a million calculations (microchip) shrinks inexorably, only three things have remained constant and unrushed: the nine months it takes to have a baby, the nine months it takes to untangle a credit card dispute and the nine months it takes to publish a hardcover book.
– Andrew Tobias

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock;
My thoughts are minutes.
– William Shakespeare

Let others praise the ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.
– Ovid

Is the plant [Thalictrum lucidum] sufficiently distinct from T. flavum? It seems to me a daughter of time.
– Carl Linnaeus [Planta, an satis distincta, a T. flavo? Videtur temporis filia. Species plantarum 1753]
Hat-tip

I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.
– Marilyn Monroe

Take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but footprints. Kill nothing but time.
– Motto of the Baltimore Grotto

The surest way to be late is to have plenty of time.
– Leo Kennedy

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
– Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.
– Leo Buscaglia

Longevity conquers scandal every time.
– Shelby Foote

Life offers two great gifts – time, and the ability to choose how we spend it. Planning is a process of choosing among those many options. If we do not choose to plan, then we choose to have others plan for us.
– Richard I. Winword

A sage thing is timely silence, and better than any speech.
– Plutarch

There are no insoluble problems. Only time-consuming ones.
– James A. Michener

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
– Peter F. Drucker

Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time.
– Jean Paul Richter

A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller.
– Paul Klee

Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.
– Karl Kraus

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax –
Of cabbages – and kings –
And why the sea is boiling hot –
And whether pigs have wings.”
– Lewis Carroll

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.
– Stephen King

Laugh and the world laughs with you. Snore and you sleep alone.
– Anthony Burgess