Writers have been complaining about the clock for as long as there have been clocks, and the complaints are often the best part of their work. The finest quotes about time do not offer a trick for managing your calendar. They stop you for a moment and make you feel how short, strange and quick the hours are. Here are six, from Shakespeare, Marvell, Thoreau, FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyam and Robert Herrick, with the context that gives them their force.
Macbeth and the long, dull march of days
Most lines about time are urgent. This one is exhausted. In the last act of Macbeth, the king is told that his wife is dead, and he answers with a speech that begins:
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day”
Here time is not rushing. It is crawling, and the repetition of the word “tomorrow” makes it crawl on the page too. The speech goes on to call life a walking shadow and a tale told by an idiot. It is easy to quote it as pure gloom, but see what is happening dramatically: a man who killed for the future now finds that the future is empty. Time in this passage is the punishment for ambition.
Sonnet 60 and the waves
Shakespeare returns to the subject in his sonnets, and his images are gentler and more exact:
“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;”
Anyone who has stood at the edge of the sea knows the motion. Each wave seems separate, but together they push in one direction. The sonnet goes on to describe how time gives and then takes away, and it ends with a hope that the poet’s verse will survive, a bet Shakespeare won.
Marvell’s chariot
Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is, on the surface, a seduction argument: if we had world enough and time, your shyness would be no crime. But we do not, and so:
“But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;”
The line works because it places the pressure behind the speaker, where he cannot see it. Time is not in front, like a goal. It comes up from behind. The poem is witty and a little shameless, but the image of the chariot is plainly serious, and it has been borrowed by writers ever since.
Thoreau refuses to kill it
Henry David Thoreau, in the opening chapter of Walden, makes a sharp remark about people who waste their lives:
“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”
He is mocking the casual phrase “killing time”. For Thoreau, time was not an enemy to be got through or a container to be filled. It was the material of life itself. The sentence reminds us that boredom is, in a sense, an insult to our own days. He spent two years at Walden Pond partly to test whether he could treat each day with attention, and the book is his report.
The moving finger
Edward FitzGerald’s nineteenth-century English version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam includes a quatrain about the irreversibility of the past:
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,”
It is worth remembering that FitzGerald’s poem is a free and creative translation of the medieval Persian poet, so the voice you hear is partly Victorian. Still, the idea is clear. What has been done cannot be undone, not by goodness and not by cleverness. The line is less about regret than about weight: every action is written in ink.
Herrick’s invitation
Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” begins with an instruction that has been misquoted for four centuries:
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;”
It is the cheerful cousin of Marvell’s poem. Rosebuds open and fade quickly, so the advice is to enjoy things in season. In context it is addressed to young women, urging them not to put off marriage, which is a very seventeenth-century concern. But the central image of the flower in bud travels well beyond its original audience.
Why time is the great poetic subject
Poets keep returning to the clock for a practical reason. A poem is itself a small piece of time: it takes a minute to read, and it has a beginning and an end. Meter and rhyme are ways of organizing duration, and a line like Shakespeare’s wave sonnet makes you feel the minutes through rhythm before you understand a single word. So when a poet writes about time, the form is already doing half the work. That is also why these lines are so much more powerful when read aloud than on a screen.
It is also why the best of them resist advice. They describe how time feels, and leave the living of it to you.
How six quotes about time fit together
Every writer here has a different relationship with the clock:
- Shakespeare in Macbeth hears emptiness.
- Shakespeare in the sonnet hears momentum.
- Marvell hears threat, and uses it as an argument.
- Thoreau hears a challenge to pay attention.
- FitzGerald’s Omar hears finality.
- Herrick hears an invitation.
It is useful that they disagree. You can choose the tone that fits your own mood, and none of them is wrong.
Closing thought
If you want a single sentence to carry with you, Thoreau’s is probably the most practical, because it does not ask you to be afraid. It only asks you to stop thinking of time as something you can spend without cost. If you want the beautiful kind of sadness, read Sonnet 60 aloud once and listen to the waves in its rhythm.
