Marcus Aurelius Quotes

Time passes irrevocably.

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.

If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.

Not Heav'n itself upon the past has pow'r; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Remember that even if you were to live for three thousand years, or thirty thousand, you could not lose any other life than the one you have, and there will be no other life after it. So the longest and the shortest lives are the same. The present moment is shared by all living creatures, but the time that is past is gone forever. No one can lose the past or the future, for if they don't belong to you, how can they be taken from you?

Each time a friend dies, the present becomes the past, in an instant.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

Time flies, and what is past is done.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise.

Time is flying never to return.

Time is the one thing I can't get back and can't give back to you.

A photograph is a moment - when you press the button, it will never come back.

Time flies never to be recalled.

You cannot build a house for last year's summer.

The past is buried and I mourn it with greater pain than many among you, because no human power can awaken it when the Crown itself has scattered ashes upon the coffin.

You can't be 24 again; you can't be new when you're 40 years old.

We can change everything but we can't stop time.

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!

Try to hold on to youth and it mocks you while it sprints away.

For a man can lose neither the past nor the future; for how can one take from him that which is not his? So remember these two points: first, that each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle, and that it signifies not whether a man shall look upon the same things for a hundred years or two hundred, or for an infinity of time; second, that the longest lived and the shortest lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.

Night falls fast. Today is the past.