Time

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair….
— Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870), A Tale of Two Cities.

The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience. Only by marking off months, weeks, and years, days and hours, minutes and seconds, would mankind be liberated from the cyclical monotony of nature.
— Daniel J Boorstin, The Discoverers, 1.

Our shelves are filled with formulas and speculations, and we still cannot say what time is; we cannot agree whether there is one time or many times, cannot even agree whether time is an essential ingredient of the universe, or whether it is the grand illusion of the human intellect.
— Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, Descartes’ Dream, Penguin, 1990, 189.

I believe the twenty-four hour day has come to stay.
— Max Beerbohm (1872-1956), A Christmas Garland.

1. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven;
2. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5. A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6. A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7. A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8. A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace.
— Holy Bible, Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8

It is quite obvious that we do not all of us inhabit the same time.
— Ezra Loomis Pound (1885 – 1972), Make It New.

The world and time had both one beginning. The world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.
— St. Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430), The City of God.

The world was created on 22nd October, 4004 BCE at 6 o’clock in the evening.
— James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (1581-1656), Chronologia Sacra. (Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers, 451, has October 26 at 9 am).

MISS HARDCASTLE: Women and music should never be dated.
— Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774) She Stoops to Conquer (Act 3).

That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
— Robert Browning (1812 – 1889), Home Thoughts from Abroad.

My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
— Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678), To His Coy Mistress.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.
— Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678).

I apprehend that you are about 55 years old if so you have by the tables an expectation of 15 years’ life and in a climate like that which is the best I know, a still better expectation …
— Sir Joseph Banks, in a letter to Captain William Bligh, dated March 15, 1805, suggesting that he become Governor of New South Wales. HRA I, liii.

It is simply a bucket half filled with water, in which floats the half of a well-scraped cocoa-nut shell. In the bottom of this shell is a very small hole, so that when placed to float in the bucket a fine thread of water squirts up into it. This gradually fills the shell, and the size of the hole is so adjusted to the capacity of the vessel that, exactly at the end of an hour, plump it goes to the bottom.
— Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), The Malay Archipelago (1869), 314.

The candelabra still shown at the cathedral of Pisa, whose oscillations are alleged to have given Galileo his idea, was only installed several years after the discovery.
— Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, Penguin edition, 593n.

I am a sundial, and I make a botch
Of what is done far better by a watch
— Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) On a Sundial.

Take a little time — count five-and-twenty.
— Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870), Little Dorrit.

There was an old loony of Lyme,
Whose candour was simply sublime;
When they asked, ‘Are you there?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but take care,
For I’m never ‘all there’ at a time.’
— Anon.

Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.
— William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) Macbeth, I, iii, 146-7.

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