73 Quotes About Time
It is the one currency you cannot earn back, spent at the same rate by everyone. These quotes are about treating the hours like the non-renewable resource they are.
“No one can remain even for a moment without performing action. Everyone is helplessly driven to act by the qualities born of nature.”
“We have spent forty years studying burnout. The data is clear: burnout is a sign that something in the organisation has broken, not that something is wrong with the person.”
“The to-do list is a productivity disaster. It scales to infinity; your attention does not. Move to a "pull system" — what do I actually have capacity for today?”
“You cannot self-care your way out of a system that was built to extract every last hour of you. Self-care can keep you alive inside the system; it cannot fix the system.”
“Sleep is the foundation, not the optional. There is no app, no supplement, no productivity trick that beats seven to nine hours.”
“We are not designed to be on all the time. The fact that we can be on all the time does not mean we should be. Energy is renewed; it is not infinite.”
“Manage energy, not time. Four wells: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. Each one renews on its own schedule. If you spend from one, refill it.”
“I collapsed at my desk. I broke my cheekbone. I had been working ninety-hour weeks and called it dedication. The collapse was the most important thing that ever happened to me — because it was the start of treating my body as a thing that m…”
“Time poverty is the new poverty. We have more material wealth and less time than any generation, and the cost of the trade is being paid by our marriages, our children, and our bodies.”
“The leisure gap — between what we have and what we feel we have — is a real measurable thing. The time is there. It is fragmented into pieces too small to do anything with.”
“You have 168 hours in a week. Everyone has 168. Track them honestly for a week and you will find that you do not in fact "have no time." You have priorities you have not made conscious.”
“The mythical 80-hour workweek does not exist. Time-use studies of self-reported workaholics show the actual number is closer to 55. The 80-hour version exists in stories, not in calendars.”
“A friend asked me what I do for fun. I could not answer. I had not done anything for fun in years. That moment was the diagnosis I had been refusing.”
“You can keep going for years on willpower and caffeine. The body keeps the score, and one day it sends the bill. Pay the smaller bill now.”
“The day you ask for help is not the day you became weak. It is the day you stopped pretending you were stronger than human.”
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year, and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didnt do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor.”
“You're not going to get rich renting out your time.”
“Earn with your mind, not your time.”
“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
“Contrary to what we usually believe, the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times — they are the moments when we are completely absorbed.”
“I forgot myself for several hours. When I looked up, the day was gone and I had no memory of the meals between.”
“I do not know what time is. The morning becomes the evening and the day is gone. Only the work remains.”
“Time slowed. The ball moved like it was suspended in glass. I could see the seams of it for the first time.”
“I love you is a sentence that does the work of a lifetime, if you are willing to mean it.”
“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”
“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.”
“Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.”
“Comfort is not a luxury to be earned later; it is the soil that ordinary days grow in.”
“The goal of medicine is not to give patients more years of life. It is to give life to their years.”
“What gets you the next ten years is the same thing that gets you to a hundred: sleep, food, movement, purpose, people.”
“Sleep is the foundation on which everything else stands. Lose sleep, lose health, lose years.”
“Routinely sleeping less than six hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubles your risk of cancer.”
“A 16-hour fast switches the body from growth to repair. Do it most days.”
“Morning sunlight in the first hour of waking sets the entire circadian system. There is no supplement that replaces it.”
“Move every day. Not because you want to live longer, but because you want today to feel like something.”
“Maat is great and its effectiveness lasting. It has not been disturbed since the day of its creation.”
“Do not let your tongue run ahead of your heart. Maat is in the small moment of waiting.”
“Keep a cookie jar. Every time you do something hard you did not think you could do, put it in the jar. On the days the new thing seems impossible, reach into the jar. The hand that wrote the cookies is the same hand reaching now.”
“The hard times will come. The hard times will go. Your job is to keep your soul alive in both.”
“The mind is the elite athlete's most powerful asset. Train it like you train the body — every single day.”
“Front-load the suck. Do the hardest thing first while willpower is highest. The day rolls downhill from there.”
“I visualized the fight ten thousand times before I walked in the ring. The fight itself was the easy part — it was just one more rep.”
“Today, victory over yourself. Yesterday, victory over a lesser opponent. Tomorrow, victory over a greater one.”
“The day you sit with discomfort and do not run is the day your nervous system learns it does not have to run anymore.”
“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”
“The crisis of connection is the crisis of our time.”
“Loneliness is now associated with a greater risk of premature death than obesity, and is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.”
“We are designed to be in relationship. From birth to the day we die, we need others to survive and to thrive.”
“We do not need more good ideas about love. We need to call the people we love today.”
“Every time you say yes to something unimportant, you say no to something important.”
“Let today mark a new beginning for you. Give yourself permission to say no without feeling guilty.”
“Sisu is the moment when, having done all you could, you continue.”
“The good life is not about searching for happiness. It is about doing what is meaningful, in small and difficult moments.”
“Finns do not say "I love you." They build something with you and let the years speak.”
“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
“Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, "You owe me." Look what happens with a love like that — it lights the whole sky.”
“The Seven Valleys of the soul are seven, and the journey through them is the work of a lifetime: Quest, Love, Knowledge, Independence, Unity, Bewilderment, Annihilation.”
“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.”
“Who can wait quietly while the mud settles? Who can remain still until the moment of action?”
“Once upon a time, Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly. He did not know he was Chuang Tzu. Suddenly he awoke. Now he does not know whether he was Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is Chuang Tzu.”
“A good cook changes his knife once a year, because he cuts. A bad cook changes his knife once a month, because he hacks. The Cook Ting follows the openings — his knife is nineteen years old, and the edge is as fresh as the day it was sharpe…”
“Death is not an end but a moment of arising into another bardo. The way we have lived is the way we will die. The way we die is the way the next state begins.”
“When you are sad and depressed, when life seems to have lost its meaning, that is the moment when bodhicitta is most needed.”
“Whenever we follow our wandering, scattered minds, we are creating the conditions for suffering. Whenever we are present, here, now — even for a moment — we are creating the conditions for liberation.”
“I sing because I cannot remember a time before I sang. The practice has eaten my life. The life has eaten the practice. There is no separation.”
“Breathing in, I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is the only moment.”
“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment.”
“There is a Tibetan word, shenpa. It means hooked. The moment you notice the hook — that noticing is freedom.”
“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”