Quotes About Time And Meaning

“Much time is spent on meaning while precious little time wasted has none!”

— M.B.JONES

“I was tired of well-meaning folks, telling me it was time I got over being heartbroke. When somebody tells you that, a little bell ought to ding in your mind. Some people don't know grief from garlic grits. There's somethings a body ain't meant to get over. No I'm not suggesting you wallow in sorrow, or let it drag on; no I am just saying it never really goes away. (A death in the family) is like having a pile of rocks dumped in your front yard. Every day you walk out and see them rocks. They're sharp and ugly and heavy. You just learn to live around them the best way you can. Some people plant moss or ivy; some leave it be. Some folks take the rocks one by one, and build a wall.”

— Michael Lee West

“The right-wing Tories and the conservative Whigs fought Napoleon as the Usurper and the Enemy of the Established Order; the liberal Tories and the radical Whigs fought him as the Betrayer of the Revolution and the Enslaver of Europe; they were all agreed in fighting him, and his notion that their disagreement signified national disunion was mere wishful thinking. All dictators since his time have fallen into the same trap: themselves blind to the values of liberty, they cannot conceive that people who disagree on its meaning can nevertheless unite in upholding their freedoms against patent despotism.”

— J. Christopher Herold

“When a film's heroine innocently coughs, you know that two scenes later, at most, she'll be in an oxygen tent; when a man bumps into a woman at the train station, you know that man will become the woman's lover and/or murderer. In everyday life, where we cough often and are always bumping into people, our daily actions rarely reverberate so lucidly. Once we love or hate someone, we can think back and remember that first casual encounter. But what of all the chance meetings that nothing ever comes of? While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark.”

— Lucy Grealy

“Human. Happiness. Death.
Everything becomes one pale
memory in the flow of time.
Spirit - always want the impossible and feel pain.
Memory - an attempt to find entirety in the endless parody
called human life.
Freedom, policy, power, sex, violence, destruction, war.
All extremes of ego are unconscious rebellion against death and loneliness.
When you realize, the meaning is lost.
I just want to believe:
when I die, I will flying like a bird ... or like dream ...”

— Alexandar Tomov

“To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.”

— Eugene B. Sledge

“Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.”

— Hilary Mantel

“We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it.”

— Neil Postman

“Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women's faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enameled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colorful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay.”

— Ray Bradbury

“He glanced over at me. 'Scared? Of Reggie? What, she thinks he might force her to give up caffeine for real or something?'
'No,' I said.
'Of what, then?' he asked.
I paused, only just now realizing that the subject was hitting a little close to home. 'You know, getting hurt. Putting herself out there, opening up to someone.'
'Yeah,' he said, adding some cheese straws to the car, but risk is just part of relationships. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.'
I picked up a box of cheese straws, examinig it. 'Yeah,' I said. 'But it's not all about chance, either.'
'Meaning what?' he asked, taking the box from me and adding the rest.
'Just that, if you know ahead of time that there might an issue that dooms everything- like, say, you're incredibly controlling and independent, like Harriet- maybe it's better to acknowledge that and not waste your time. Or someone else's.”

— Sarah Dessen

“Time has no meaning in the wyldwood. Day and night don't really exist here, just light and darkness, and they can be as fickle and moody as everything else. A "night" can pass in the space of a blink, or go on forever. Light and darkness will chase each other through the sky, play hide-and-seek or tag or catch-me-if-you-can. Sometimes, one or the other will become offended ... and refuse to come out for an indefinite amount of time. Once, light became so angry, a hundred years passed in the mortal realm before it deigned to come out again. And though the sun continued to rise and set in the human world, it was a rather turbulent period for the world of men, as all the creatures who lurked in darkness and shadow got to roam freely under the lightless Nevernever skies.”

— Julie Kagawa

“I was starting to understand the true meaning of soul mates. They weren't necessarily people who you are supposed to spend forever with. No, they are people who know you, and who you'll always be connected with, no matter what time passes and where you are in the world.”

— Angela Richardson

“Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy.”

— Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“What a powerful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do not, how extraordinary the ability to consider a time that's never been experienced. And how tragic not to consider it. It galls us, we with such a limited future, to see someone brush it aside as meaningless, when it has an endless capacity for meaning, and an endless number of meanings that can be found within it.”

— David Levithan

“The course and affairs of our individual life, in view of their true meaning and connection, are like a piece of crude work in mosaic. So long as one stands close in front of it, one can not correctly see the objects presented, or perceive their importance and beauty; it is only by standing some distance away that both come into view. And in the same way one often understands the true connection of important events in one's own life, not while they are happening, or even immediately after they have happened, but only a long time afterwards.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

“Thomas' work.  Abigail Thomas is one of our wisest, most beautiful writers; a writer whose stories and memoirs I have loved for a long time. She has an equally great eye, and heart, for what is true, and for what holds meaning and hope in our lives. Couple this with a brilliant, dark sense of humor, and you will see why every writer I know waits for each new book.  Thomas has written”

— Anonymous.

“I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

“All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning.”

— Tom Waits

“According to the standard reading of the Organon, Aristotle holds that there are ten categories of existing things as follows: substance, quality, quantity, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and passion. According to Ockham's reading, however, Aristotle holds that there are only two categories of existing things: substance and quality. Ockham bases his interpretation on the thesis that only substances and qualities have real essence definitions signifying things composed of matter and form. The other eight categories signify a substance or a quality while connoting something else. They therefore have nominal essence definitions, meaning that they are not existing things.”

— Anonymous.

“In the time it takes to say 'now,' now is already over. It's already 'then.' 'Then' is the opposite of 'now.' So saying 'now' obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't.”

— Ruth Ozeki

“You know I love you. You're the only one."
"She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them.”

— Margaret Atwood

“You have stopped the arrow of time ...
There's no meaning to this rhyme ...
Because my song will never mean as much as the one..
He once sang..
For you, yes, you ...”

— Megan McCafferty

“There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.”

— Toni Morrison

“Even in the realm of pure mathematics, the mathematician may use any set of symbols he desires within any given region of space-time; he may even go so far as to maintain that any one set of symbols fits the scheme as well as any other, but to erect this method into a philosophy and confuse independence of any one special meaning with independence of all meaning is unjustified and unwarranted.”

— Fulton J. Sheen

“If," we say readily, "God is holy and omnipotent, He would interfere and stop all this kind of thing"
meaning by "this kind of thing" wars, persecutions, cruelty, Hitlerism, Bolshevism, or whatever large issue happens to be distressing our minds at the time. But let us be quite sure that we have really considered the problem in all its aspects.
"Why doesn't God smite this dictator dead?" is a question a little remote from us. Why, madam, did He not strike you dumb and imbecile before you uttered that baseless and unkind slander the day before yesterday? Or me, before I behaved with such cruel lack of consideration to that well-meaning friend? And why, sir, did He not cause your hand to rot off at the wrist before you signed your name to that dirty little bit of financial trickery?”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

“October is the cruelest month of any election year, but by then, the pain is so great that even the strong are like jelly and time has lost all meaning for anybody still involved in a political campaign. By that time, even candidates running unopposed have abandoned all hope of victory and live only for the day when they will finally be free to seek vengeance on all those treacherous bastards who once passed themselves off as loyal friends and allies and swore they were only in it because they all shared the same hopes and dreams ...”

— Hunter S. Thompson

“We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase 'to live like men.”

— Edward Abbey

“Religion was once life's central mystery, its worship life's most awesome experience, its beliefs life's broadest canopy of meaning as well as its deepest guarantee of belonging. Yet today, where religion still survives in the modern world, no matter how passionate or committed the believer, it amounts to little more than a private preference, a spare-time hobby, and a leisure pursuit.”

— Os Guinness

“Causality is the way we explain the link between two successive events. Synchronicity designates the parallelism of time and meaning between psychic and psychophysical events, which scientific knowledge so far has been unable to reduce to a common principle.”

— C.G. Jung

“Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear language until she develops perfect pitch, but she also has to feel language, to know it sweat and dry. The writer finds the words are visceral, and when she can eat them, wear them, and enter them like tunnels she discovers the alleged separation between word and meaning between writer and word is theoretical.”

— Jeanette Winterson

“We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that's all.”

— Albert Camus

“It appears that, as is the case in our time with the ills of all nations, the reason lies in the lack of a reasonable religious teaching which by explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme law for the guidance of conduct and would replace the more than dubious precepts of pseudo-religion and pseudo-science with the immoral conclusions deduced from them and commonly called 'civilization'.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

“I just sing the song and I sing it with conviction, meaning and I get into the mood of every song I do no matter how much time I have in between.”

— B.J. The Chicago Kid

“Life is meaningless only if we allow it to be. Each of us has the power to give life meaning, to make our time and our bodies and our words into instruments of love and hope.”

— Thomas Head Raddall

“I often felt better as soon as I swallowed my vitamin C, long before it had time to take effect. Medical researchers call it 'placebo effect'; I prefer to call it magic, for it occurs when something - a pill or a word - is imbued with power and meaning, and so it becomes effective. That is alchemy.”

— Kat Duff

“Oh my research. Well, I got an English Degree. And I got that degree in a certain time/at a certain place. If you add UC Berkeley + 1984 the other side of the = is "new historian" meaning that I studied with and was influenced by those who were interested in how the personal shaped the political (and literary), how science and literature might interact, and what the body got to do with it.”

— Laura Mullen

“I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.”

— Paul Valery

“If you don't connect yourself to your family and to the world in some fashion, through your job or whatever it is you do, you feel like you're disappearing, you feel like you're fading away, you know? I felt like that for a very very long time. Growing up, I felt like that a lot. I was just invisible; an invisible person. I think that feeling, wherever it appears, and I grew up around people who felt that way, it's an enormous source of pain; the struggle to make yourself felt and visible. To have some impact, and to create meaning for yourself, and for the people you come in touch with.”

— Bruce Springsteen