Waste of time

“ They have infinite crotchets and caprices with their clocks and watches, which seem made for any thing but to tell the hour—gold-repeaters, watches with metal covers, clocks with hands to count the seconds. There is no escaping from quackery and impertinence, even in our attempts to calculate the waste of time. ”

“ Look at the phrase 'a waste of time.' How do we know exactly how much time a man ought to allot to sleep, to work, to leisure? I had an old puritanical friend who was very fond of telling people that they wasted time. ”

“ I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numb'ring clock: My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, Whereto my finger, like a dial's point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. ”

“ No, I am afraid it doesn't—not enough time. Somehow the proportions have become distorted. We consider play almost a waste of time and with life short as it is, to fool time away has become little short of a sin. ”

“ Oh yes, it will take time; but nothing that is worth doing is waste of time. Two years. Shall we give ourselves two years, more or less, to get what is to be got from other lands, from the contemplation of other peoples? ”

“ Life, however short, is made still shorter by waste of time, and its progress towards happiness, though naturally slow, is yet retarded by unnecessary labour. ”

“ To be a few minutes too early, may appear to many as inconsistent with the order of the present day, when everything is pushed to extremity, and it may consequently be considered as a useless waste of time ”

“ I wasted Time, and now doth Time waste me:
For now hath Time made me his numbring clocke; ”

“ As I have previously said, the chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career. ”

“ "Time is given us to be happy, and for no other reason," replied the boy soberly. "When we waste time, we waste happiness. ”

“ "If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn't say 'waste it.' It's him." ”

“ Here, too, then, in order to obey that universal master, pleasure or gold, they must devour time, hasten time, find more than four-and-twenty hours in the day and night, waste themselves, slay themselves, and purchase two years of unhealthy repose with thirty years of old age. ”

“ Time, thy name is sorrow, says the stricken
Heart of life, laid waste with wasting flame
Ere the change of things and thoughts requicken,
Time, thy name. ”

“ People talk of our changing every seven years, but they make me feel as if I changed every seven minutes. What will you have, at any rate, and how can I help it? It's the grind of life, the wear and tear of time and misfortune. ”

“ My life has been evil, my sins many. What if there be an avenging Power waiting, as some think, to grind me into powder, and then endow each crushed particle with individual sense of endless misery? What if there be a hell! In a few minutes, or what will seem but a few minutes —for surely, to the disembodied spirit, time cannot exist; though it sleep a billion years, it will be as a breath—I shall have solved the problem. ”

“ It is only with the idle and lazy that time lags and creeps slowly along. How the minutes crawl while one is waiting without anything to do—they seem to lengthen themselves out in the most extraordinary manner. ”

“ Every hour in itself, and in respect to us, is unique; when once it is gone, it is entirely lost, and millions of ages will not bring it back again; days, months, and years, are swallowed up and irrevocably lost in the abyss of time; time itself shall be destroyed ”

“ We know of a thousand things we want to say, but the time slips by wasted, and hangs drearily on our hands. We have not the spirit to look forward, or the heart to look back. We long to have it all over, and yet every stroke of the clock falls like a cruel knell on our ears. ”

“ We, who live by machinery which measures for most men the hours of work, the hours of play, until life becomes a time-table and the heart a chronometer, are absolutely incapable of indifference to Time's tyranny. ”

“ If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be, as Poor Richard says, the greatest prodigality, since, as he elsewhere tells us, Lost time is never found again, and what we call time enough always proves little enough. ”

“ I grudge each minute of time that passes, and am so ashamed that I did not get something out of each of those lost minutes. They are gone, absolutely gone, and can never come back. There is not time to think, they go so quickly, and whilst one debates what to do with them they are gone; and yet one can live in each of them, have life, love, joy, laughter, what you will. I am never dull, I have no time for it; I want to do a hundred things in each minute—and you only want to kill those minutes—they are dying, dead as we speak! ”

“ All measurement of time oppressed him; life at such moments only appeared to him to be a nervous struggle to avoid hearing the beats marking its flight, the pulse-like throb of the seconds, the chiming of the hours, and like a clock's hands passing away over the thin and thick lines, over that empty scheme of time, whose laws we are to carry out, well or ill, often when our heart's blood is being shed. ”

“ One thing alone attracted my attention: the hands of a clock fixed at the moment of Frederic's death; I was deceived by the immobility of the picture: hours never stay their flight; it is not man that stops the career of time, it is time that stops the career of man. Besides, it matters little what part we have played in life; the brilliancy or obscurity of our doctrines, our riches or poverty, our joys or sorrows in no way influence the length of our days. ”

“ It is only as the pageant of life passes by and the masques turn their backs upon us, that we see through the deception, or believe that the train will have an end. In many cases, the slow progress and monotonous texture of our lives, before we mingle with the world and are embroiled in its affairs, has a tendency to aid the same feeling. We have a difficulty, when left to ourselves, and without the resource of books or some more lively pursuit, to ‘beguile the slow and creeping hours of time,’ and argue that if it moves on always at this tedious snail’s-pace, it can never come to an end. ”

“ An improper use of time is the source of all the disorders which reign amongst men. Some pass their whole life in idleness and sloth, equally useless to the world, their country, and themselves: others, in the tumult of business and worldly affairs. ”

“ On the other hand, the miscalculation of time involves us in perpetual hurry, confusion, and difficulties; and life becomes a mere shuffle of expedients, usually followed by disaster. Nelson once said, “I owe all my success in life to having been always a quarter of an hour before my time.” ”

“ We do not {486} value time as we should, but let many golden hours pass by unimproved. We loiter during the day-time of life, and ere we know it the night draws near "when no man can work." Oh, hours misspent and wasted! How we wish we could live them over again! ”

“ It was to some extent time wasted. The worst agony of death at the moment when the sands are running out and minutes are precious is the feeling that so many hours of life have been wasted on things that did not matter. ”

“ Rely upon it, if you are a miser of moments, if you hoard up and turn to account odd minutes and half-hours and unexpected holidays, the five-minute gaps while the table is spreading, your careful gleanings at the end of life will have formed a colossal and solid block of time, and you will die wealthier in good deeds harvested than thousands whose time is all their own. ”

“ And at length this dark fanaticism, losing the support of his pride in the mere novelty of a reasoning so hard and dry, turned round upon him, as our fanaticism will, in black melancholy. The theoretic or imaginative desire to urge Time's creeping footsteps, was felt now as the physical fatigue which leaves the book or the letter unfinished, or finishes eagerly out of hand, for mere finishing's sake, unimportant business. ”

“ Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.’ As we advance in life, we acquire a keener sense of the value of time. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence; and we become misers in this respect. We try to arrest its few last tottering steps, and to make it linger on the brink of the grave. ”

“ No writer, whose work is familiar to me, has ever yet described with unsparing fidelity the kind of misery which lies in having to do precisely the same things at the same hour, through long and consecutive periods of time. The hours then become a dead weight which oppresses the spirit to the point of torture. Life itself resembles those dreadful dreams of childhood, in which we see the ceiling and the walls of the room contract round one's helpless and immobile form. ”

“ And yet, after all, how many of us sit with our hands folded, doing nothing, thinking nothing, but just mentally and physically limp, weighed down by empty, useless time, which we try to kill with yawning desperation. ”

“ Consider what will be the sentiments of the damned in hell of the value of time, when time shall be no more: how bitterly will they regret for all eternity all those hours, days, months and years, which were allowed them by the bounty of their Creator, during the space of their mortal life ”

“ As if time should suddenly, in unguarded moments, hurry with eager, noiseless steps, so can hours burn into seconds for one intoxicated—seconds which fly out of the soul like sparks, in order to illuminate a sickly web of curious, dare-devilish dreams, woven out of a confused mingling of the past and the future. ”

“ They say simply, 'It's the wrong time.' Following up this clue I have noticed that not only is the time for performing an act supposed to be sometimes 'wrong' and sometimes 'right,' but that the idea of time governs all of you, like an absolute tyrant. Even your so-called free-thinkers, who lead a life without God, never dream of daring to live without a clock and a calendar. And just as the Waam-folk are unconsciously obsessed by their hut-thought, and see everything from that angle, so you have drifted into an exaggerated pre-occupation with time. ”

“ No little part of the torment of existence lies in this, that Time is continually pressing upon us, never letting us take breath, but always coming after us, like a taskmaster with a whip. If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the misery of boredom. ”

“ They beheld in it the arbiter of their undivined destinies.
It is an awful emotion when we feel that the "very shoal of time" on which we stand is freighted with the good and ill of futurity—that the instant birth of the hour inherits our entire fortunes. ”

“ I have not the power to increase the time nor even to suspend it, but I have the power of shortening it, and that I give to you. Whenever in your life you come upon hours that are useless, sorrowful, or unpleasant, and wish to shorten them, pull the string and the hours will pass. ”

“ In that same instant, perhaps another individual is struggling with overwhelming sorrow, and an extension of that sorrow would cause the individual many times more difficulty. No, it is much better that time continues. The inconsistency of life necessitates the seconds, minutes and hours which make up a day. Life is, at times, difficult to bear, and time passes, allowing one to rest and derive solace from the bits of serenity found here and there along the way. ”

“ Yet Time, forsooth, wrests even this anchorage from you. Comes an hour when, confronted by the inevitable, helpless in its grip, unreconciled even in your resignation, you dully stand by a bedside and wait—wait—wait. ”

“ Time, the inexorable taskmaster of poor humanity, drives us hard with whip and spur when we are struggling under the heavy burden of work; but stays his hand, and prolongs the creeping hours, when we are delivered over to that weariness of spirit which weights each moment with lead. ”

“ Hence the useless watch, the inert position that we have all held at times, the loss of time which every thoughtful man gives mechanically to that which has disappeared. None escapes this law. We become stubborn in a sort of vague fury. ”

“ Time itself was a nightmare of running, falling, rising, staggering, running again until the blood pounded in her temples, drummed in her ears. The cry came again, as near as before—nearer? Throughout the night as she struggled on she could always fancy the stealthy, silent feet following her, keeping time with her own. ”

“ For we have every one of us felt how a very few minutes of the months and years called life, will sometimes suffice to place all time past and future in an entirely new light; will make us see the vanity or the criminality of the bygone, and so change the aspect of the coming time that we look with loathing on the very thing we have most desired. ”