Time

Seasons, Annual Cycles, Months, Year, Past, Present
Future, Timing, Timeliness, Becoming, Progress
Impermancence, Memories, Anticipation 
Quotations for Gardeners, Walkers, and Lovers of the Green Way

Quotes     Months    Recommended Reading     Links     Process Philosophy    

Gardening     Walking    Home     Cloud Hand Blog

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

Green Way Research, Vancouver, Washington, 2021

"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
-  Emily Dickinson 

"Gardeners , like everyone else, live second by second and minute by minute.  What we see at one particular moment is then and there before us.  But there is a second way of seeing.  Seeing with the eye of memory, not the eye of our anatomy, calls up days and seasons past and years gone by."  
-  Allen Lacy, The Gardener's Eye, 1992, p. 16 

"If you want work well done, select a busy man - the other kind has no time."  
-  Elbert Hubbard

"There is an appointed time for everything. 
And there is a time for every event under heaven -
A time to give birth, and a time to die;
A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted."
-  Ecclesiastes, 3:1-2 

"Who forces time is pushed back by time; who yields to time finds time on his side."
-  Talmud

"Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence
Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence
Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance."
-   Yoko Ono, Season of Glass

"To these delights of a garden, age may add a further interest which can hardly be distinguished from beauty, for the mind, at least with those who have the historic instinct, is always longing to be connected with the past, and dreading for itself confinement upon the plane of time, delights in evidences of the long continuance of nations, families and institutions, in hale and vigorous old age, in long-settled peace beyond the turn of Fortune's wheel, the 'scornful dominion of accident.'  Restfulness is the prevailing note of an old garden; in this fairy world of echo and suggestion where the Present Age never comes but to commune with the Past, we feel the glamour of a Golden Age, of a state of society just and secure which has grown and blossomed as the rose."
-  Sir George Sitwell, On the Making of Gardens, 1909 

"People find life entirely too time consuming."
-  Stanislaw J. Lec  

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
-   C. Northcote Parkinson 

"What then is time?  If no one asks me, I know what it is.  If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know."
-   Saint Augustine

"We know the past but cannot control it.
We control the future but cannot know it."
-   Claude Shannon

"Everything requires time.  It is the only truly universal condition.  All work takes place in time and uses up time.  Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource.  Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time."
-   Peter F. Drucker 

"This nondescript, never-to-be-defined daytime is
The secret of where it takes place
And we can no longer return to the various
Conflicting statements gathered, lapses of memory
Of the principal witnesses.  All we know
Is that we are a little early, that
Today has that special, lapidary
Todayness that the sunlight reproduces
Faithfully in casting twig-shadows on blithe
Sidewalks. No previous day would have been like this.
I used to think they were all alike,
That the present always looked the same to everybody
But this confusion drains away as one
Is always cresting into one's present."
-  John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

"Time goes, you say?  Ah no!
Alas, Time stays, we go."  
-   Henry Austin Dobson  

"Time is the wisest counselor of all."
-   Pericles

"Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us."
-   Henrik Tikkanen 

"Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away." 
-   Charles Caleb Colton

"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely."
-   Rodin  

Soma-Aesthetics

The Five Senses

Cloud Hands Blog

Process Philosophy and Time

"It strikes! one, two,
Three, four, five, six. Enough, enough, dear watch,
Thy pulse hath beat enough. Now sleep and rest;
Would thou could'st make the time to do so too;
I'll wind thee up no more."  
-   Ben Jonson 

"We all have our time machines.  Some take us back, they're called memories.  Some take us forward, they're called dreams."
-   Jeremy Irons 

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.  There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature— the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."
-   Rachel Carson

"In summary, therefore, while in a normal waking mode of consciousness, our perceived present rarely lasts longer than five seconds, and frequently it lasts less than a second.  On the average, the time-span of the perceived present persist for two to three seconds."
-  James L. Christian, Philosophy, 1973, p.196

"For eternally and always there is only one now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end."
-   Erwin Schrodinger

"... 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."
-   Frank Waters, Mountain Dialogues, 1981

"Half our time is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save."
-  Will Rogers

"Time is the justice that examines all offenders."
-   William Shakespeare 

"Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them."
-  Dion Boucicault

"So many years in one yesterday." 
-  Carla Phelps Wert

"This is June, the month of grass and leaves . . . already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me.  I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late.  Each season is but an infinitesimal point.  It no sooner comes than it is gone.  It has no duration.  It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought.  Each annual phenomena is reminiscence and prompting.  Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolution of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other.  We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact.  A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature.  Now I am ice, now I am sorrel.  Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind."
- Henry David Thoreau, Journal, June 6, 1857

"The past is a guidepost, not a hitching post."
-   Thomas Holcroft

"But all the clocks in the city
     Began to whirr and chime:
"O let not Time deceive you,
     You cannot conquer time.

"In the burrows of the Nightmare
     Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
     And coughs when you would kiss.

"In headaches and in worry
     Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
     To-morrow or to-day.

"Into many a green valley
     Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
     And the diver's brilliant bow.

"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
     The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
     A lane to the land of the dead."
-  W. H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening, 1937 

"Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished."
-  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Tis an old dial with many a stain;
In summer crowned with drifting orchard bloom,
Tricked in the autumn with the yellow rain,
And white in winter like a marble tomb.
And round about its gray, time-eaten brow
Lean letters speak - a worn and shattered row:
I am a Shade: A Shadowe too arte thou:
I marke the Time: saye, Gossip, dost thou soe?"
-  Austin Dobson, The Sundial, 1900

"A new home by a gap in the Meng wall;
Of the old trees, a few gnarled willows are left.
Those who come in the future, who will they be,
Grieving in vain for what others had before?"
-   Wang Wei (701-761 AD)

"Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all."
-   Stanley Horowitz

"This grand show is eternal.  It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising.  Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and glowing, on sea and continues and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."
-  John Muir

"Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways."
-  Stephen Vincent Benet

"When Time who steals our years away
Shall steal our pleasures too,
The mem'ry of the past will stay,
And half our joys renew."
-   Thomas Moore, 1779-1852

"Only the ephemeral is of lasting value."
-   Ionesco

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
-   Gandhi

"Then sleep the seasons, full of might;
While slowly swells the pod,
And rounds the peach, and in the night
The mushroom bursts the sod.

The winter comes: the frozen rut
Is bound with silver bars;
the white drift heaps against the hut;
and night is pierced with stars."
-   Coventry Patmore, 1823-1896, The Seasons  

"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time."
-   Leonard Bernstein     

"Forty is about the age for unexpected developments: extroverts turn introspective, introverts become sociable, and everyone, without regard to type, acquires grey hairs and philosophies of life.  Many also acquire gardens."
-   Janice Emily Bowers,  A Full Life in a Small Place, 1993 

"The day is of infinite length for him who knows how to appreciate and use it."
-   Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The bad news is time flies.  The good news is you're the pilot."
-   Michael Althsuler

Leisure -   Quotes for Gardeners 

Mind-Body Movement Arts 

Meditation 

Above the Fog by Mike Garofalo  

Tarot: Divination and Meditation

"Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall."
-   Annie Dillard

"One today is worth two tomorrows.  
Lost time is never found again.  
Time is money. 
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff that life is made of.
You may delay, but time will not."
-   Benjamin Franklin  

"For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work."
-   Doug Larson

"But because truly being here is so much; because everything
here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some
strange way
keeps calling to us.  Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing.  Just once; no more.  And we too,
just once.  And never again.  But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing."
-  Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, 9th, 1923
   Translated by Stephen Mitchell 

"The great dividing line between success and failure can be expressed in five words: “I did not have time.”
-   Franklin Field

"To the attentive eye, each movement of the year has it's own beauty, and in the fame field it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before and which shall never be seen again."
-   Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,
Let it be forgotten forever and ever,
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old."
-   Sara Teasdale,  Let it Be Forgotten

"Modern Western culture has absorbed the threefold Greco-Roman concept of time as "past" (that which has gone before), "present" (that which is), and "future" (that which will be).  It is easy to associate these concepts with the three Norns Urdhr, Verdhandi, and Skuld.  It is also incorrect.  The Germanic time-sense is not threefold, but twofold: time is divided into "that-which-is," a concept encompassing everything that has ever happened - not as a linear progression, but as a unity of interwoven layers; and, "that-which-is-becoming," the active changing of the present as it grows from the patterns set in that-which-is.  That-which-is is the Germanic "world," a word literally cognate to the Norse ver-öld, "age of a man."  One will notice that even in modern English, there is no true future tense; the future can only be formed through the use of modal auxiliaries.  For the Teutonic mind, all that has been is still immediate and alive; the present only exists as it has been shaped by the great mass of what is, and the future only as the patterns of that which is becoming now should shape in turn."
-  By Kveldulf Gundarsson, Tuetonic Magic, p. 24. 

"Between two moments, bliss is ripe.
Think in the morning, Act in the noon, Eat in the evening, Sleep in the night.
In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy."
-  William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

"The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time."

-   Abraham Lincoln

"I saw Master Chang San-Feng
Enter the Sidhe, Fairies by his side,
Crossing over the pond at dawn.
Astonished I was!
On the teahouse table by the pond I later found
Some of his neatly printed notes
Folded in a well worn tome 
Of the Tao Te Ching, in Chapter 14.

He had written:
”Even for an Immortal, the Past is the Key.

The Future
Grasp at it, but you can’t get it,
Colorless as an invisible crystal web,
Unformed, thin, a conundrum of ideas,
The Grand White Cloud Temple of Possibilities,
Flimsy as a maybe, strong as our hopes,
Silent as eternal Space.
When you meet it, you can’t see its face.
You want to stand for it, but cannot find a place.

The Present
It appears and disappears through the moving ten thousand things,
Quick as a wink, elusive as a hummingbird,
Always Now with no other choice,
Moving ground, unstable Plates,
Real as much as Real gets to Be,
This Day has finally come,
Room for something, for the moment, waits
Gone in a flash, assigned a date,
Gulp, swallowed by the future.
Unceasing, continuous, entering and leaving
The vast empty center of the Elixir Field.

The Past
Becoming obscurer, fading, falling apart,
A mess of memories in the matrix of brains;
Some of it written, fixed in ink, chiseled in stone,
Most of it long lost in graves of pure grey bones.
Following it you cannot see its back,
Only forms of the formless, stories, tales,
Images of imageless, fictions, myths.
A smattering of forever fixed facts,
Scattered about the homes of fading ghosts.    
The twists and turns of millions of tongues
Leaving us languages, our passports to the past.

The future becomes past, the present becomes past,
Every thing lives, subtracting but seconds for Nowness, in the Past. 
The Realms of the Gods, the kingdoms of men,
The Evolutionary Tree with roots a million years long
Intertwined with turtles, dragons, trees, stars and toads;
     crickets, coyotes, grasses, tigers, bears, monkeys and men. 

These profoundest Three of Time
An unraveled red Knot of Mystery,
Evading scrutiny in the darkness of days
Eluding capture in the brightness of nights,
In beginnings and endings are only One, the Tao,
Coming from Nowhere, Returning to Nothing. 

What dimension of Time
Does your mind dwell within?
Future, Present or Past
Where is your homeland? 

The Past holds the accomplishments, the created, the glories, and the Great.
The Present is but a thin coat of ice on the Pond of Fate. 
The Future is an illusion, a guess, a plethora of possible states.

Recreate the Past
By playing within the Present. 
Twisting and reeling one’s silky reality
From the Black Cocoons of the Acts
From which we create our Pasts.
Follow the Ancient Ways.    
The Past is the Key.”   

-  Michael P. Garofalo, Meetings with Master Chang San Feng

"The past is solid, the future is liquid."
-   J.L. Aubert  

"All that really belongs to us is time; even he who has nothing else has that."
-   Baltasar Gracian  

"All my possessions for a moment of time."
-   Queen Elizabeth I

"Another reason you "can't take it with you" - it goes before you do."
-  Source Unknown 

"It is like clouds rising in the sky: suddenly there, gone without a trace. 
And it is like drawing a pattern on water: it is neither born nor passes away. 
This is cosmic peace and eternal rest.
When it is enclosed, it is called the matrix of the realization of suchness;
When it emerges from the enclosure, it is called the cosmic body of reality."
-   Ma-tsu

"The gardening season officially begins on January 1st and ends on December 31st."
-  Marie Huston  

"No sooner did I bend over and scratch the soil with the hoe that I began to unearth bits and pieces ... of my past.  Memories forever rooted in time were clustered in my garden consciousness like potatoes, waiting, crying to be dug up.  ...  I plant flowers and vegetables.  I harvest memories - and life."
-   Nancy H. Jordan  

"Time is a great healer, but a poor beautician."
-   Lucille S. Harper 

"Each moment has its sickle, emulous
Of Time's enormous scythe, whose ample sweep
Strikes empires from the root."
-   Edward Young  

"It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?"
-   Henry David Thoreau

"As lousy as things are now, tomorrow they will be somebody's good old days."
-   Gerald Barzan  

"The locus of the Present is our opportunity to conform, to follow the past, to repeat the familiar, to play by the same old rules, to return to work, to honor our traditions and customs.  The present looks very much like the past, sounds much like the familiar karmic tunes replayed, feels like yesterday, smells like sweet memories.  Survival steers a steady course of habits through the recurrences of the ordinary.  Memories advise frequent repetition of advantageous acts.  The laws of our bodies, medical facts, also control our destinies.  The laws of our minds are our habits, convenient pathways, routines that work.  Nevertheless, we creatures must cope with novelty, changes, unique circumstances, chance events, and the emergence of the New."
-  Michael P. Garofalo 

"We never remember days, only moments."
-   Cesare Pavese  

"The gardener's rule applies to youth and age: When young 'sow wild oats'; but when old, grow sage."
-   H.J. Byron   

"A garden should be in a constant state of fluid change, expansion, experiment, adventure; above all it should be an inquisitive, loving, but self-critical journey on the part of its owner."
-   H. E. Bates 

"Patience is a flower that does not grow in everyone's garden."
-   English proverb

"Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."   
-   William Faulkner

"We can hold back neither the coming of the flowers nor the downward rush of the stream; sooner or later, everything comes to its fruition."
-   Loy Ching-Yuen 

"The plants arrive, usually on a day that is either raining or requires one's presence elsewhere, work perhaps.  Plant orders do not arrive on sunny, warm Saturday mornings."
-   Steve Hatch    

"When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets."
-  Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All to Human   

"The day is conscious of itself."
-  Rumi  

"So little time, so little to do."
-   Oscar Levant

"The mind of the past is ungraspable;
the mind of the future is ungraspable;
the mind of the present is ungraspable."
-  Diamond Sutra

"Four seasons fill the measure of the year; there are four seasons in the minds of men."
-   John Keats

"A white crowned night sparrow sings as the moon sets.
Thunder growls far off.
Our campfire is a single light.
Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls.
The manifold voices of falling water
Take all night.
Wrapped in your down bag
Starlight on you cheeks and eyelids
Your breath comes and goes
In a tiny cloud in the frosty night.
Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise.
Ten thousand years revolve without change.
All this will never be again."
-  Kenneth Rexroth, The Wheel Revolves, 1966
 

"To create a garden is to search for a better world.  In our effort to improve on nature, we are guided by a vision of paradise.  Whether the result is a horticultural masterpiece or only a modest vegetable patch, it is based on the expectation of a glorious future.  This hope for the futureis at the heart of all gardening."
-   Marina Schinz  

"If you don't think about the future, you can't have one." 

"The future is like the daytime moon, a diffident but faithful companion, so elegant as to be almost invisible, an inconspicuous marvel."
-  Robert Grudin   

"When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in the early spring."
-   Farkas Bolyai  

"I don't think of the past.  The only thing that matters is the everlasting present."
-  William Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

"It's not over until it's over."
-Yogi Berra  

"To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring."
-  George Santayana 

"I have seen the future and it's like the present, only longer."
-   Dan Quisenberry  

"We must laugh and philosophize and manage our households and look after our other affairs all at the same time, and never stop proclaiming the words of the true philosophy.  We must try to make the latter part of the journey better than the first, so long as we are en route; and when we reach the end, we must keep an even keel and remain cheerful.  It is possible to get protection against other things, but when it comes to death, all of us human beings live in a city without walls."
-  Epicurus

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?”
-  T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity."
-  Henery David Thoreau 

"The cycle of nature—the progress from seed to fruition to dying-off and then renewal in the spring—was mirrored in the wild fields and the cultivated garden alike, while the fragility of harvest—the possible interruption of the cycle by drought, wind, or other natural calamities— established the pattern of how humans understood the workings of the cosmos.  The oldest of surviving sacred stories have their roots in the garden and reflect how humanity sought to understand the changeable patterns of their world and, at the same time, to imagine a world no longer subject to change.
-   Peg Streep, Gardening as a Spiritual Tool  

"One faces the future with one's past."
-   Pearl S. Buck  

"Ordinary people think merely how they will spend their time, a man of intellect tries to use it."
-   Schopenhauer

"If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves."
-   Maria Edgeworth  

"You can't learn anything from saguaro cactus, from ocotillo.  They are just passing through; their roots, their much heralded dormancy in the dry season, these are only illusions of permanence. They know even less than you do."
-  Barry Lopez  

"There be delights that will fetch the day about from sun to sun and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream ...  For a garden is Arcady brought home.  It is man's bit of gaudy make-believe - his well-disguised fiction of an unvexed Paradise... a world where gayety knows no eclipse and winter and rough weather are held at bay."
-   John D. Sedding, Garden-Craft, 1893

"Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination.  You are always living three, or indeed six, months hence.  I believe that people entirely devoid of imagination never can be really good gardeners.  To be content with the present, and not striving about the future, is fatal."
-  Alice Morse Earle, 1897  

"Be mindful of how you approach time. Watching the clock is not the same as watching the sun rise."
-   Sophia Bedford-Pierce

"Everywhere is here and every when is now."
-   Dante 

"It is better to have lived one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep." 
-   Tibetan saying

"The purpose of art is to stop time."
-   Bob Dylan

"What continues to astonish me about a garden is that you can walk past it in a hurry, see something wrong, stop to set it right, and emerge an hour or two later breathless, contented, and wondering what on earth happened."
-   Dorothy Gilman

"We must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day had been."
–   Sophocles 

"And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity."
-   Andrew Marvell    

"Life isn't a matter of milestones but of moments."
-   Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy  

"We do not remember days, we remember moments."
-   C. Pavese  

"There is a kind of immortality in every garden."
-  Gladys Taber    

"Time is the fire in which we burn."
-   Delmore Schwartz   

"We say we waste time, but that is impossible.  We waste ourselves."
-   Alice Bloch

"Eternity is the Absolute present."
-  D. T. Suzuki  

"One must learn a different... sense of time, one that depends more on small amounts than big ones."
-   Sister Mary Paul

"The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks."
-  Tennessee Williams    

"Eternity is in love with the productions of time."
-   William Blake  

"Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours."
-   Mark Twain

"Our gardens are environments of perpetual change.  The cypress reach their heights of glory as the fruit trees wane.  The daffodils finish their blooms just as the liquidambar begins to bud.  Pansies and snapdragons wilt in the same heat that brings the roses alive.  We are not dissuaded."
-   Tonia Triebwasser,  The Color of Grace: Thoughts From a Garden in a Dry Land 

"If is a word that has humbled many gardeners.  But it hasn't made us quit."
-  Katherine Endicott    

"Brute force crushes many plants.   Yet the plants rise again.  The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.  And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing.  Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging.  It is just singing.  And in the beginning it was not a Word, but a chirrup."
-   D. H. Lawrence  

"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."
-   Antoine de St. Exupery, The Little Prince  

"Have you ever noticed a tree standing naked against the sky, 
How beautiful it is?  
All its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness 
There is a poem, there is a song.  
Every leaf is gone and it is waiting for the spring.  
When the spring comes, it again fills the tree with 
The music of many leaves, 
Which in due season fall and are blown away.  
And this is the way of life."
-   Krishnamurti

"Gardeners instinctively know that flowers and plants are a continuum and that the wheel of garden history will always be coming full circle.  One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one's horticultural goals.  If a garden is a site for the imagination, how can we be very far from the beginning?
-   Francis H. Cabott, Chairman of The Garden Conservancy  

"What will remain of my legacy?
Flowers in the spring,
The hototogisu in summer,
And the crimson leaves of Autumn."
-  Ryokan, 1758-1831
   One Robe, One Bowl, Translated by John Stevens   

"Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes.  Autumn is the mellower season, and what we
lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits."
-  Samuel Butler  

"Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it.  No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination.  Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today."
-   Lord Chesterfield 

"Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires."  
-   Charles Caleb Colton  

"The time is always right to do what is right."
-   Martin Luther King 

"Catch, then, oh catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies!
Life's a short summer, man a flower;
He dies - alas! how soon he dies!"
- Samuel Johnson. 1709-1784,  Winter. An Ode  

"Regret for wasted time is more wasted time."
-   Mason Cooley 

"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?" 
-   Paracelsus

"Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly--and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing."
-   Omar Khayyám   

"What is history but a fable agreed upon?"
-  Napoleon Bonaparte

"There is a continuity about the garden and an order of succession in the garden year which is deeply pleasing, and in one sense there are no breaks or divisions - seed time flows on to flowering time and harvest time; no sooner is one thing dying than another is coming to life."
-    Susan Hill and Rory Stuart, Reflections from a Garden, 1995  

"The great French Marshall Lyautey, once asked his gardener to plant a tree.  The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years.  The Marshall replied, "In that case, there is not time to lose, plant it this afternoon!"
-  John F. Kennedy

"So fades a summer cloud away;
So sinks the gale when storms are o'er;
So gently shuts the eye of day;
So dies a wave along the shore."
-  Mrs. Barbauld, 1743-1825, The Death of the Virtuous  

"The worst days of those who enjoy what they do are better than the best days of those who don't."
-   Jim Rohn

"Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.  Live the actual moment. Only this moment is life."
-  Thich Nat Hahn  

"It's a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up." 
-   J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire  

"Oh, tell me how my garden grows,
Where I no more may take delight,
And if some dream of me it knows,
Who dream of it by day and night."
-  Mildred Howells, 1872-1966  

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
-   Shakespeare, Macbeth

"Spend the afternoon.  You can't take it with you."
-   Annie Dillard  

"Slow down and everything you are chasing will come around and catch you."
-   John De Paola 

"Time disappears when we sleep."
-  Mike Garofalo, Sleeping Your Way to Nirvana

"The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it."
-   Jean Paul Sartre

"Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress."
-   Alfred A. Montapert

"One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides."
-  W. E. Johns 

"There is nothing permanent except change."
-  Heraclitus

"Some reckon time by stars,
And some by hours;
Some measure days by dreams
And some by flowers;
My heart alone records
My days and hours."
-  Madison J. Cawein  

"When planning for a year, plant corn.  
When planning for a decade, plant trees.
When planning for life, train and educate people."
-  Chinese Proverb    

"Gardening imparts an organic perspective on the passage of time." 
-   William Cowper  

"This narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless seas,
The past, the future:  - two eternities!"
-  Thomas Moore, 1779-1852,  Lalla Rookh: The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan.

"Only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new.  Only he knows the secret of change, only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else, and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power."
-   Peter Beagle    

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
-  Niels Bohr

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it - the dead feeling of winter.  Something waits beneath it - the whole story doesn't show."
-  Andrew Wyeth 

"There is still no cure for the common birthday."
-  John Glenn, U. S. Senator, at age 75

"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too: to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line."
-  Henry David Thoreau 

"Leaves have their time to fall,
And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,
And stars to set; but all,
Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death!"
John Milton, The Hour of Death 

The Parcae - The Three Roman Goddess's Creating and Ending One's Lifespan
The Parcae or Moirae (Greek) spin, measure, and cut the cord that is your life. 

"Day, n.  A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent."
-   Ambrose Bierce

"... the spring, the summer,
The chilling autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world
By their increase, now knows not which is which."
-  William Shakespeare,  A Midsummer Night's Dream 

"No single thing abides; but all things flow.
Fragment to fragment clings - the things thus grow
Until we know them and name them.  By degrees
They melt, and are no more the things we know."
-   Lucretius  

"I am tired of the imposed rhythms of men,
Tethered time, restrained and trained
To a monotonous beat
Digital time blinking exactness
Unliving."  
-   Phillip Pulfrey, Beyond Me 

"All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today and yesterday."
-  Chinese proverb    

"Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence – neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish – it is an imponderably valuable gift.  Each of us has a few minutes a day or a few hours a week which we could donate to an old folks home or a children's hospital ward.  The elderly whose pillows we plump or whose water pitchers we refill may or may not thank us for our gift, but the gift is upholding the foundation of the universe."
-   Maya Angelou   

"For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed."
-  Blaise Pascal    

"The mills of God grind slowly but they grind finely."
- Irish Proverb  

"Look well to this day.  Yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision.  But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope.  Look well therefore to this day."
-   Francis Gray    

"For four-fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pondscum." 
-   J. W. Schopf  

ticking my life away,
indifferent clocks
everywhere
-  Mike Garofalo, Cuttings

"Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow."
-  Mathew Browne

"If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat."
-   Lily Tomlin 

"Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week."
-   Charles Richard

"Opportunity knocks, but the inevitable just comes on in."
-   Allan Harris 

"It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day to day basis."
-   Margaret Bonnano 

"The years like great black oxen tread the world
And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind."  
-   William Butler Yeats, The Countess Cathleen

"Thou hast set all the borders of the earth: Thou hast made summer and winter."
-   Psalms 74:17    

"Tomorrow is the busiest day of the year."
-   Spanish Proverb    

"Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens."
-  Ralph Waldo Emerson    

"Some things arrive in their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever."
-   Gail Goodwin  

"If it weren't for the last minute, a lot of things wouldn't get done."
-   Michael S. Traylor

"A garden is never so good as it will be next year." 
-   Thomas Cooper    

"Time does not change us.  It just unfolds us."
-   Max Frisch

"Every season hath its pleasures;
Spring may boast her flowery prime,
Yet the vineyard's ruby treasures
Brighten Autumn's soberer time."
-  Thomas Moore   

"Whatever else seems pleasant at first apprehension, at length becomes dull by too long acquaintance.  But the pleasures of a Garden are every day renewed.  A Garden is the only complete delight the world affords, ever complying with our various and mutable Minds."
- Author Unknown 

"It is only when you start a garden - probably after age fifty - that you realize something important happens every day."
-    Geoffrey B. Charlesworth 

"Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.  Live the actual moment.  Only this moment is life."
-  Thich Nat Hahn

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.  Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking."
-   Steve Jobs 

"Time is something everyone runs short on and finally runs out of.
When gardening, half an hour is fifty minutes. 
Everywhere, what is, becoming past, present, and future. 
Time may wait for no man, but seems to muddle and poke along quite slowly for gardeners.    
Things always go downhill, fall apart, wear out  ... the arrow of Time pierces everything.     
Gardeners learn to live in worm time, bee time, and seed time. 
Gardeners turn into the soil their lifetime. 
Time will tell, but we often fail to listen.  
Dirty fingernails and a calloused palm precede a Green Thumb.
The time you have wasted in your garden is what makes it priceless. 
All metaphors aside - only living beings rise up in the Springtime; dead beings stay quite lie down dead. 
Time prevents too much from happening at once. 
Gardening requires no commuting time. 
Each time we water can be like the first time if we are fully present in the moment.
One purpose of a garden is to stop time in one place. 
Time will not pass you, but it will follow very close behind you. 
Time is rooted in Place. 
Annuals disappear, shrubs perish, trees die, and gardeners are buried; death is the flower of time.   
Springtime for birth, Summertime for growth; and, all Seasons for dying. 
By the time you peel off five layers of reality, it's hard to recall the first. 
Time is not free, so spend it wisely. 
Time creeps, walks, runs and flies– it's all about moving things. 
We get things done when there is little time left. 
Winter does not turn into Summer; ash does not turn into firewood - on the chopping block of time.
The "eternal truths" are sometimes clearly false.
In the right place at the right time: tomato worms on tomato vines. 
Take the time to melt into the Details.  
In an instant there is nothing - Nature needs time.
All the past was once new. 
Gardening teaches us to take our time, slow down, and wait in peace. 
A garden flourishes in the mind's time of last season, next season, and now."
-   Mike Garofalo, Pulling Onions     Over 1,038 sayings, quips, insights, odd definitions. 

"Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve."
-  George Santayana 

"Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils."
-   Hector Louis Berlioz  

"I never think of the future.   It comes soon enough."
-  Albert Einstein 

"Anyone who thinks that gardening begins in the spring and ends in the fall is missing the best part of the whole year.  For gardening begins in January, begins with the dream."
-   Josephine Nuese, 1970, The Country Garden    

"There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now."
-  Eugene O'Neill   

"Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year -- and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!"
-   Anthony Robbins

"Doing a thing well is often a waste of time."
-   Robert Byrne 

"God gave us memories, that we might have June roses in the December of our lives."
-  James M. Barrie 

"Whether we wake or we sleep,
Whether we carol or weep,
The Sun with his Planets in chime,
Marketh the going of Time." 
-   Edward Fitzgerald

"Let me define a garden as the meeting of raw nature and the human imagination in which both seek the fulfillment of their beauty.  Every sign indicates that nature wants us and wishes for collaboration with us, just as we long for nature to be fulfilled in us.  If our original state was to live in a garden, as Adam and Eve did, then a garden signals our absolute origins as well as our condition of eternity, while life outside the garden is time and temporality."
-   Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, p. 96  

"Gardeners celebrate the influence of time.  If we have had a late cold spring followed by a desiccating drought, autumn may be the most soft and golden for years; one poor season will sooner or later be compensated for by another."
-    Susan Hill and Rory Stuart, Reflections from a Garden, 1995    

"Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others."
-  Winston Churchill  

"What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old sundials!  It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens.  Why is it almost everywhere vanished?  If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance.  It spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures not protracted after sunset, of temperance, and good hours.  It was the primitive clock, the horologue of the first world.  Adam could scare have missed it in Paradise."
-   Charles Lamb, Essays, 1823

"Don't let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it.  The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use."
-   Earl Nightingale

"The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough."
-  Rabindranath Tagore  

"What may be done at any time will be done at no time."
-   Scottish Proverb   

"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."
-  Napoleon Bonaparte

Autumn - Quotes and Poems for Gardeners

October     November     December 

Sex Magick

Tree Lore and Magic 

Eight of Wands Magick

Death - Quotes for Gardeners  

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishin in.  I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.  It's thin current slides away, but eternity remains.  I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars."
-   Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"Even God cannot change the past."
-  Agathon

"The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now."
-  James Baldwin   

"Years following years steal something every day; At last they steal us from ourselves away."
-  Alexander Pope, 1688-1744  

"The key is in not spending time, but in investing it."
-   Steven Covey

"I trust in Nature for the stable laws
Of beauty and utility.  Spring shall plant
And Autumn garner to the end of time."
-  Robert Browning    

"Time is the substance I am made of.  Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire."
-  Jorge Luis Borges, Labryrinths   

"Nature often holds up a mirror so we can see more clearly the ongoing processes of growth, renewal, and transformation in our lives."
-  Mary Ann Brussat     

"Nothing is ours except time"
-   Geothe
 

"I come like Water, and like Wind I go."
-  Omar Kahyam 

"With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown."
-  Chinese Proverb   

"Do not be attached to the past or wait for the future.  Be grateful for each day, that is enough.  I do not believe in a future world, I deny the past.  I believe entirely in the present.  Employ your entire body and mind in the eternal now."
-   Santoka Taneda, 1882-1940
    Mountain Tasting, Translated by John Stevens    

"Summer, fall, winter, spring,
The seasons rotate as each brings
its special beauty to this earth of ours.
Winters' snow and Summers' flowers
Frozen rivers will flow come spring,
There is a renewal of everything." 
-   Edna Frohock  

"Time is the longest distance between to places."
-   Tennessee Williams  

"What very mysterious things days were.  Sometimes they fly by, and other times they seem to last forever, yet they are all exactly twenty four hours.  There's quite a lot we we don't know about them."
-   Melanie Benjamin  

"In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these."
-  Paul Harvey  

"Time is the coin of your life.  It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spend.  Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you."
-   Carl Sandburg 

"Finally, I realized what makes my garden exciting is me.  Living in it every day, participating minutely in each small event, I see with doubled and redoubled vision.  Where friends notice a solitary hummingbird pricking the salvia flowers, I recall a season's worth of hummingbird battles."
-  Janice Emily Bowers, A Full Life in a Small Place, 1993

"At times I think and at times I am."
-  Paul Valery

"Memories are forget-me-nots gathered along life's way, pressed close to the human heart into a perennial bouquet."
-   Clara Smith Reber 

"How long a minute is, depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on."
-   Zall's Second Law  

"The trouble with out times is that the future is not what it used to be."
-  Paul Valery 

"An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth."
-   Bonnie Friedman 

"Without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that, this doubtless is the right way to live."
-   Henry James

"Spring comes with flowers, autumn with the moon, summer with the breeze, winter with snow.  When idle concerns don't fill your thoughts,
that's your best season."
- Wu Men 

"The whole life of man is but a point of time; let us enjoy it."
-   Plutarch    

"Time discovers truth.
Time heals what reason cannot."
-   Seneca 

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment
passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on
the hop.  Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming.  Growth of the soul, growth of the mind."
-   Vita Sackville-West

"We look backward too much and we look forward too much; thus we miss the only eternity of which we can be absolutely sure – the eternal present, for it is always now."
-  William Phelps   

"Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend."
-  Theophrastus 

"Calendars are for careful people, not passionate ones."
-   Chuck Sigars 

"Here is a little forest
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum;
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!"
-  Emily Dickenson, #2, 1851 

"If your going to try to push nature, it just pushes right back against you."
-   Neil Dunaetz, Chicago's Cabrini-Green Gardens  

"You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by."
-   James Matthew Barrie

"Time is a cruel Thief to rob us of our former selves.  We lose as much to life as we do to death."
-  Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey 

"Nothing is as far away as one minute ago."
-   Jim Bishop 

"All our moments are last moments.   We abide in the forever leaving of our own coming?  We can put our hands together, palm to palm,
settling here on the last leaf of our brief flight, and bow to the wonder of it."
-   Jen Jensen, Bowing to Receive the Mountain, 1997   

"You've got a lot pulling at your time already – which may be the best reason to start cultivating your green thumb."
-   Steven Willson   

"People have schedules. Plants have cycles.  People will stay up late, get up early, skip meals, cut corners, drive too fast, and otherwise work themselves into a frenzy to get something done in less time. Some people live their entire lives this way, rushing from one thing to the next, perpetually poised to seize the future.  Plants aren't like that. Oh sure, you can root prune a tomato plant to trick the fruit into ripening sooner. You can soak seeds overnight to hasten sprouting. And no doubt the geneticists are fooling around with the timing of food crops along with everything else.  But that's all about human intervention.  Left to itself, a plant will take every day, every moment that it requires.  Plants know just what is meant by "the fullness of time," a phrase that seems to have slipped from our revved up, cut-to-the-chase conversations."
-   Joyce McGreevy, Gardening by Heart: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Garden  

"The common man is not concerned about the passage of time, the man of talent is driven by it."
-   Arthur Schopenhauer 

"To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts."
-  Henry David Thoreau    

"These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today.  There is no time for them.  There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.  But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.  He cannot be happy and strong until he lives with nature in the present, above time.
-  Ralph Waldo Emerson

"No greater thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig.  If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time.  Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen."
-  Epictetus  

"You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it."
-   Charles Buxton

"A single day is enough to make us a little larger."
-   Paul Klee  

"Whether you know it or not, you are the gardener of your own being, the seed of your destiny."
-  The Findhorn Community, The Findhorn Garden

"In Western languages the names of the four seasons became complete only a few centuries ago.  Words for winter and summer appear quite early but in English "spring" came to be used as the name of the season as late as the sixteenth century, and in German 'fruhjahr', "spring" appeared about the same time. Similarly, in India "hemanta (winter) and vasanta (spring)" appear in Sanskrit literature very early, while other seasonal terms come much later."
-  The Importance of Season Words  

"The gardener's work is never at at end; it begins with the year, and continues to the next: he prepares the ground, and then he sows it; after that he plants, and then he gathers the fruits..." 
-  John Evelyn, Kalendarium Hortense, 1706  

"Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!.... his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his hands are mutes."
-   Charles Dickens   

"This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."
-   Ralph Waldo Emerson 

"Old Time, in whose banks we deposit our notes
Is a miser who always wants guineas for groats;
He keeps all his customers still in arrears
By lending them minutes and charging them years."
-   Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Guard well your spare moments.  They are like uncut diamonds.  Discard them and their value will never be known.  Improve them
and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life."
-   Ralph Waldo Emerson  

"Life is all about timing - the unreachable becomes reachable, the unavailable becomes available and attainable.  Have the patience, and wait it out.  It's all about timing."
-   Stacey Charter 

"Methinks I see the wanton hours flee,
And as they pass, turn back and laugh at me."
-   George Villiers

"We can no more afford to spend major time on minor things than we can to spend minor time on major things."
-   Jim Rohn

Willpower - Quotes, Poems, Sayings  

Work 

Mind-Body Training  

Tarot: Divination and Meditation  

Time is four letter word and so is Life.
Slower is a six letter word and so is Garden.
-  Adapted from an Indian saying by Mike Garofalo 

"The seasons don't matter to most of us anymore except as spectacles.  In my county and in many places around this part of the nation, the fair that once marked the harvest now takes place in late August, while tourist dollars are still in heavy circulation.  Why celebrate the harvest when you harvest every week with a shopping cart?
-  Bill McKibben, The End of Nature    

"At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May's newfangled mirth;
But like each thing that in season grows."
-   William Shakespeare  

"The flower that you hold in your hands was born today and already it is as old as you are."
-   Antonio Porchia, Voces  

"There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore: -
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more."
-  William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, Ode, Intimations of Immortality    

"Time is free, but it's priceless.  You can't own it, but you can use it.  You can't keep it, but you can spend it.  Once you've lost it you can never get it back."
-   Harvey MacKay 

"In reality, killing time is only the name for another of the multifarious ways by which Time kills us."
-   Osbert Sitwell  

"Live each day as if it be your last."
-   Marcus Aurelius

"Time is:
Too slow for those who wait,
Too swift for those who fear,
Too long for those who grieve,
Too short for those who rejoice,
But for those who love,
Time is eternity."
-   Henry Van Dyke  

"Determine never to be idle.  No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any.  It is wonderful how much can be done if we are always doing."
-   Thomas Jefferson 

"Time is what we want most, but... what we use worst."
-   Willaim Penn

"An instant realization sees endless time.
Endless time is as one moment.
When one comprehends the endless moment
He realizes the person who is seeing it."
-   Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, p. 158 

"Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror.  It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving."
-   Martin Amis, Money 

"Time is a figure eight, at its center the city of Deja Vu." 
-   Robert Brault 

"Better late than never, but never late is better.  
You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future. 
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. 
Time is the cruelest teacher: she first gives the test, then teaches the lesson.
If you get up one more time than you fall, you will make it through. 
All good things must come to an end; but some bad things can continue forever.
Time wastes our bodies and our wits, but we waste time, so we are quits. 
Don't count every hour in the day, make every hour in the day count.
Time is like a handful of sand: the tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers."
-  Authors Unknown  

"It has taken me half a lifetime merely to find out what is best worth doing, and a good slice out of another half to puzzle out the ways of doing it."
-   Gertrude Jekyll

"Our true home is in the present moment.  To live in the present moment is a miracle.  The miracle is not to walk on water.  The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment." 
-  Thich Nhat Hanh    

"Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations."
-   Faith Baldwin

"I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour.  One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction."
-  Ralph Waldo Emerson  

"Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time."
-   John Donne 

"The clock talked loud.  I threw it away, it scared me what it talked."  
-   Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle   

"And pluck till time and times are done
the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun."
-  William B. Yeats, The Song of Wandering Aengus    

"Time is just something we assign.  You know, past, present, it's just all arbitrary.  Most native Americans, they don't think of time as linear, in time, out of time.  I never have enough time, circular time, the Stevens wheel.  All moments are happening all the time."
-  Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess, Northern Exposure TV series

"Love makes time pass; time makes love pass."
French Proverb  

"I am definitely going to take a course on time management... just as soon as I can work it into my schedule."
-   Louis E. Boone

"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."
-  Clive Staples Lewis    

"We can hold back neither the coming of the flowers nor the downward rush of the stream; sooner or later, everything comes to its fruition."
-  Loy Ching-Yuen  

"In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime.  But all these times and places and occasions are now and here.  God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages."
-   Henry David Thoreau, Walden 

"The inertia hardest to overcome is that of perfectly good seconds."
-   Martin H. Fischer   

"A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life."
-   Charles Darwin

"Yesterday is a cancelled check; tomorrow is a promissory note; today is the only cash you have - so spend it wisely."
-   Kay Lyons 

"I was thinking about how disjointedly time seemed to flow, passing in a blur at times, with single images standing out more clearly than others.  And then, at other times, every second was significant, etched in my mind."
-  Stephanie Meyer 

"Time, the cradle of hope.... Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it:  he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends."
-   Charles Caleb Colton

"Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening at once."
-   John Archibald Wheeler

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."
-   Albert Einstein

"But what minutes!  Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day."
-   Benjamin Disraeli  

"A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours."
-   John B. Priestly

"We don't have an eternity to realize our dreams, only the time we are here."
-   Susan Taylor

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
-   Bertrand Russell 

"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 Waitely  

"They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."
-  Andy Warhol  

"Time is the only thief we can't get justice against."
-   Astrid Alauda

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."
-   Henry David Thoreau 

"Time is like the wind, it lifts the light and leaves the heavy."
-   Doménico Cieri Estrada  

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time." 
-   Leo Tolstoy

"Time is money." 
-  Benjamin Franklin

"Time waits for no one."

"Better three hours too soon than a minute too late." 
-  William Shakespeare

"Lost time is never found again."
-  Benjamin Franklin

"Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend."
-  Theophrastus

"Time is the wisest counselor of all."
-  Pericles

"The key is in not spending time, but in investing it."
-  Stephen R. Covey

"Punctuality is the thief of time."
-  Oscar Wilde

"If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got."
-   Lee Iacocca

Recommended Reading 

Process Philosophy and Time

Exploring Time

Four Seasons in classical music compositions.  By Kelly Ferjutz. 

From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.  By Sean Carroll.  Dutton, 2010.  448 pages.  ISBN: 0525951334. 

Moirae - Greek Fates  In Greek and Roman mythology there are three goddesses who control the destiny or fates of both men and gods.  Clotho, Spinner,  spun the thread of life from her distaff onto her spindle, and her Roman counterpart was Nona.  Lachesis, Drawer of Lots, measured the thread of life allotted to each person with a special measuring rod, and her Roman counterpart was Decima.  Atropos, Inevitable, was the cutter of the thread of life for each person, thereby ending each person's life, and her Roman equivalent was Morta. 

Months: Poems, Quotes, Sayings, Lore, Seasonal Celebrations  

One Old Druid's Final Journey: Notebooks of the Librarian of Gushen Grove  

The Philosophy of Time.  Edited by Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath.  Oxford Readings in Philosophy Series.  Oxford University Press, 1993.  230 pages.  ISBN: 0198239998.  

Time and the Art of Living.  By Robert Grudin.  New York, Mariner Books, 1982, 1997.  208 pages.  ISBN: 0395989315.  VSCL. 

Timeless Quotations 

Time Quotes and Sayings - Google Search

Time - Wikipedia

xRefer - Season

Expressions and Clichés About Time

All good things must come to an end
Better late than never
Break time  
End of time  
Hard time  
Last minute 
Last time
Little time
Nick of time 
Now is the time 
Once upon a time
Our time
Part-time 
Places in time
Quick time 
Response time 
Tea time 
Time and time again 
Time changes everything  
Time flies 
Time for a change 
Time of our lives
Timely manner 
Time on your hands
Time out 
Time traveler
Time waits for no man 
Timing is everything 
Water under the bridge 
Winn'in time 
Work time