Theme

Philosophy quotes about time

Philosophy of time asks what tense and duration are—and how memory, death, and history shape a human life.

Why this theme matters

Is time a river, a dimension, or a structure of consciousness? Augustine, Bergson, and modern metaphysics offer rival pictures while ethics asks how finite time should be spent.

In the history of philosophy

Ancient cosmologies, medieval theology, phenomenology of lived time, and physics-informed metaphysics keep the theme open.

Thinkers in this collection

Heraclitus , Seneca , Augustine of Hippo , G. W. F. Hegel , George Santayana , Han Feizi , Qian Mu , Ibn Khaldun

Frequently asked questions

What do philosophers say about time?

They debate whether time is objective or mind-dependent, how past and future exist, and what temporal finitude means for value.

Who wrote famous lines about time?

Augustine, Marcus Aurelius, Bergson, and many poets-philosophers appear in this archive’s English renderings.

Where are philosophy quotes about time?

This theme gathers passages on duration, memory, and the present.

  1. Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow.
  2. All else belongs to others; time alone is ours.
  3. Claim yourself for yourself.
  4. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know.
  5. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
  6. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
  7. When the age changes, affairs change; when affairs change, preparations must change.
  8. Toward the past history of one’s own country, one should hold a warmth of feeling and a sense of respect.
  9. Man is a child of customs, not of his ancestors.
  10. For one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day.
  11. Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination.
  12. The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
  13. Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow.
    Horace
    Roman Literary Thought
  14. We do not think real time. But we live it.
  15. Do not be troubled about whether the rest of life will be long or short, as if that mattered much.
  16. It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it.
  17. All things are alien to us; time alone is ours.
  18. There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.
  19. Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
  20. Royal authority and large-scale dynastic power are attained only through group feeling (ʿaṣabiyya).
  21. History is a discipline that has a large number of approaches. Its useful aspects are very many. Its goal is distinguished.
  22. The past resembles the future more than one drop of water another.
  23. The world was created ex nihilo; it did not eternally accompany the Creator.
  24. I believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who led the Israelites out of Egypt with signs and miracles—not in the God of Aristotle.
  25. Israel among the nations is like the heart among the organs: it is the most sensitive and the most receptive of the divine influence.
  26. I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny.
  27. Négritude, in my eyes, is not a philosophy. Négritude is not a metaphysics. … It is a way of living history within history.
  28. Because man had been slave he cannot enslave without negating himself.
  29. Before the ego cogito there is an ego conquiro; “I conquer” is the practical foundation of “I think.”