Time's Influence Quotes

The past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.

… the silent artillery of time

I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present.

Time says hush: by the gong of time you live. Listen and you hear time saying you were silent long before you came to life and you will again be silent long after you leave it, why not be a little silent now? Hush yourself, noisy little man. Time hushes all: the gong of time rang for you to come out of the hush and you were born. The gong of time will ring for you to go back to the same hush you came from. Winners and losers, the weak and the strong, those who say little and try to say it well, and those who babble and prattle their lives away, time hushes all.

The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable.

Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!') In heavens name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.

Time will end all my troubles, but I don't always approve of Time's methods.

The present necessarily betrays the past.

The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.

Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.

The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.

Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.

Lies always come first, dragging fools along by their irreparable vulgarity. Truth always lags last, limping along on the arm of time.

The past is always knocking at the door, trying to break through into today.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

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.

...photographs are facts, but not necessarily true... The present always surpasses the past, and the future will not care about today.

When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both.

It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.

Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the influence of its begetting.

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.

the tentacles of today reach out like an octopus to swallow yesterday.

He hath shook hands with time.

We must expect everything and fear everything from time and from men.

I have come too late into a world too old.