Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Time Quotations

Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors, than from his virtues.

It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.

The everyday cares and duties, which men call drudgery, are the weights and counterpoises of the clock of time, giving its pendulum a true vibration and its hands a regular motion; and when they cease to hang upon its wheels, the pendulum no longer swings, the hands no longer move the clock stands still.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each tomorrow Find us farther than today.

I venerate old age; and I love not the man who can look without emotion upon the sunset of life, when the dusk of evening begins to gather over the watery eye, and the shadows of twilight grow broader and deeper upon the understanding.

The secret anniversaries of the heart.

Enjoy the Spring of Love and Youth, to some good angel leave the rest; For Time will teach thee soon the truth, there are no birds in last year's nest!

A handful of red sand from the hot clime Of Arab deserts brought, Within this glass becomes the spy of Time, The minister of Thought.

Time, like a preacher in the days of the Puritans, turned the hour-glass on his high pulpit, the church belfry.

Art is long, and time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave.

Time has laid his hand Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.

Think not because no man sees, such things will remain unseen.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls; The day returns, but nevermore Returns the traveler to the shore, And the tide rises, the tide falls.

To-day, to-morrow, every day, to thousands the end of the world is close at hand. And why should we fear it? We walk here, as it were, in the crypts of life; at times, from the great cathedral above us, we can hear the organ and the chanting choir; we see the light stream through the open door, when some friend goes up before us; and shall we fear to mount the narrow staircase of the grave that leads us out of this uncertain twilight into life eternal?

Time rides with the old At a great pace. As travellers on swift steeds See the near landscape fly and flow behind them, While the remoter fields and dim horizons Go with them, and seem wheeling round to meet them, So in old age things near us slip away, And distant things go with us.

How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams with its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of Beginnings, Story without End, Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!

Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.

Let us then be up and doing, With a heart for any fate, Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.

To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.

Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act -- act in the living Present! Heart within and God overhead.

If spring came but once a century instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all the hearts to behold the miraculous change.

What is time? The shadow on the dial, the striking of the clock, the running of the sand, day and night, summer and winter, months, years, centuries-these are but arbitrary and outward signs, the measure of Time, not Time itself. Time is the Life of the Soul.