Take a moment to read these sayings about time
26 Quotes About Time That Make You Grateful for Every Second
Updated on Dec. 06, 2024
Time is the most precious gift we have, and with it passing so quickly, it’s important to reflect on how beautiful it really is. We keep it, we lose it, we pass it and we cherish it. Given that it dictates nearly every aspect of our lives, it’s no surprise that there are plenty of sayings about time, as well as time quotes that help us stop and appreciate what we have. So, take a minute (you have 1,440 of them today) to read these life-changing quotes about time.
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Short quotes about time
1. “The future starts today, not tomorrow.” —Pope John Paul II
2. “Time is the longest distance between two places.” —Tennessee Williams
3. “The less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in.” —Lord Chesterfield
4. “Yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.” —Khalil Gibran
5. “You can’t turn back the clock, but you can wind it up again.” —Bonnie Prudden
6. “Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.” —Max Frisch
7. “Time is a game played beautifully by children.” —Heraclitus
8. “Life is long if you know how to use it.” —Seneca
Inspirational quotes about time
9. “Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep t, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it, you can never get it back. So take care of those minutes!” —Harvey Mackay
10. “Although we try to control it in a million different ways, the only things you can ever really do to time are enjoy it or waste it. That’s it.” —A.J. Compton
11. “No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.” —Haruki Murakami
12. “The present time has one advantage over every other—it is our own.” —Charles Caleb Colton
13. “The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.” —G.K. Chesterton
14. “The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.” —Johann Paul Friedrich Richter
15. “Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.” —George Bernard Shaw
16. “Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, it’s the only time we’ve got.” —Art Buchwald
Famous quotes about time
17. “The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” —C.S. Lewis
18. “Time flies over us but leaves its shadow behind.” —Nathaniel Hawthorne
19. “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” —Marthe Troly-Curtin
20. “We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.” —John F. Kennedy
21. “Time is a brisk wind, for each hour it brings something new.” —Paracelsus
22. “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” —The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
23. “Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can’t buy more hours. Scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.” —Denis Waitley
Funny quotes about time
24. “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” —Douglas Adams
25. “Aside from Velcro, time is the most mysterious substance in the universe. You can’t see it or touch it, yet a plumber can charge you upwards of $75 per hour for it without necessarily fixing anything.” —Dave Barry
26. “So little time and so little to do.” —Oscar Levant
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’ve been sharing our favorite quotes for over 100 years. The sayings and quips that appear in the magazine’s “Quotable Quotes” (formerly “Remarkable Remarks”) are curated from interviews and essays originally published in the magazine, reprints from trusted titles and other verified sources. For this piece, Emma Taubenfeld tapped her experiences as a lifestyle editor for Reader’s Digest to ensure that all information is accurate. We’ve gone the extra step and had Christine Coppa, a fact-checker with 20-plus years of experience, including serving as staff research editor at Philadelphia magazine and at Essence, verify that all quotes are attributed correctly and have credible sourcing. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
