John Dryden Quotes

For every minute, the future is becoming the past.

Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. ... Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.

Time is a brisk wind, for each hour it brings something new... but who can understand and measure its sharp breath, its mystery and its design?

Well, we think that time "passes," flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.

I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don't consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows.

Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.

The now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.

The swiftness of time is infinite, as is still more evident when we look back on the past.

The velocity with which time flies is infinite, as is most apparent to those who look back.

The avalanche of time sweeps everything before it. Every individual instant hurtles into oblivion, drowning out the obliteration of the instant immediately preceding it, and then it too disappears under the onslaught of the next and the next and the next. When the avalanche has shuddered past for a long enough time, the perception of the past evolves. Distant events grow beyond mere history and take on the weight of legend.

How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time, the past and the future, in which all things disappear.

We see which way the stream of time doth run.

In retirement, the passage of time seems accelerated. Nothing warns us of its flight. It is a wave which never murmurs, because there is no obstacle to its flow.

We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.

Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.

A year's a long time, but it also flickers past in no time at all.

The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.

Time flies apace-we would fain believe that everything flies forward with it.

Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

Time is not a linear flow, as we think it is, into past, present, and future. Time is an indivisible whole, a great pool in which all events are eternally embodied and still have their meaningful flash of supernormal or extra - sensory perception, and glimpse of something that happened long ago in our linear time.

How slow the shadow creeps: but when 'tis past How fast the shadows fall. How fast! How fast!

Time's waters will not ebb nor stay.

Time flies whether you are having fun or not.