Conrad Aiken Quotes

Time touches all things with a destroying hand.

Nor do they speak properly who say that time consumeth all things; for time is not effective, nor are bodies destroyed by it.

It is useless to contend with the irresistible power of Time, which goes on continually creating by a process of constant destruction.

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

Time is not kind to everything.

Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay; Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

The surest poison is time.

The cancer of time is eating us away

Devouring Time and envious Age, all things yield to you; and with lingering death you destroy, step by step, with venomed tooth whatever you attack.

Time is truly the great enemy. It's not the great healer, it's the great stealer.

Beauty is transformed over time, and not without destruction.

Time is the great workman of Nature.

If you have only two or three things that you can enjoy and they are things which time and decay may remove from you, what are you going to do in old age?

I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.

The soul of an individual; your soul and my soul, is that part of us that is immortal. Your personality is that part of you that was born into time, that matures in time, or at least grows older in time and then decays and passes away.

It's funny, don't you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.

Huge knots of sea-weed hung upon the jagged and pointed stones, trembling in every breath of wind; and the green ivy clung mournfully round the dark and ruined battlements. Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling us proudly of its own might and strength, as when, seven hundred years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise of feasting and revelry.

O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away.

The true finish is the work of time, and the use to which a thing is put. The elements are still polishing the pyramids.

My galligaskins, that have long withstood The winter's fury, and encroaching frosts, By time subdued (what will not time subdue!), A horrid chasm disclosed.

We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.