In this post, we’ve collected for you the best time quotes to help you appreciate the little moments in life and make them count.
Sometimes, we feel as if there is not enough time to finish some tasks. In other times, we just waste that time by let it go in unimportant things and end up wishing we could go back in time. So, wasting your time is either because you think a lot about the future or simply because you regret the past.
Time is something that we all have the same amount of each day. Everyone of us has 24 hours in one single day. But how do you spend those 24 hours you have in each day?
In life, every moment is very precious and we shouldn’t waste it. We’ve put together for you below a collection of the best time quotes to remind you to take a moment to appreciate the gift of time.
Whether you are looking for some motivational words, a funny saying to make you smile, or an inspiring quote about time and love, the following quotes will inspire and help you live and enjoy the moment.
10 Best Time Quotes
“We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.” — John F. Kennedy“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” — Marthe Troly-Curtin
“Time is what we want most but what we use worst.” — William Penn“Tough times never last, but tough people do.” — Robert H. Schuller
“ ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.” — Timothy Ferriss“Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.” — Bil Keane“Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.” — William Shakespeare
“The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.” — Finley Peter Dunne“Time will not slow down when something unpleasant lies ahead.” — Harry Potter“The time for action is now. It’s never too late to do something.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Time Quotes on Waiting for the Perfect Moment
“Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right.’ Start where you stand and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.” — George Herbert
“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” — John Wooden“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is to say, ‘I don’t want to.’” — Lao Tzu“Your success will be in direct proportion to how you spend your ‘free’ time.” — Mike Dunlap
“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.” — Bruce Lee“You may delay, but time will not.” — Benjamin Franklin“You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it.” — Charles Buxton“Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.” — Dale Carnegie
“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured, it may never arrive. Mountains will not be climbed, races won, or lasting happiness achieved.” ― Maurice Chevalier
Quotes About Time & Work
“When I’m doing a movie, I’m not doing anything else. It’s all about the movie. I don’t have a wife. I don’t have a kid. Nothing can get in my way… I’ve made a choice, so far, to go on this road alone. Because this is my time. This is my time to make movies.” — Quentin Tarantino
“Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.” — Coco Chanel“People are often so busy living that they never stopped to wonder why.” — Terry Pratchett“It’s not about the paycheck, it’s about respect, it’s about looking in the mirror and knowing that you’ve done something valuable with your day.” — Dave Kovic
“The great dividing line between success and failure can be expressed in five words: ‘I did not have time.’” — Franklin Field“Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.” — Sam Levenson“A person who has not done one half his day’s work by ten o’clock runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.” ― Emily Bronte“I never look back, darling. It distracts from the now.” ― Edna Mode, The Incredibles
“By faithfully working eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.” ― Robert Frost“It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?” ― Henry David Thoreau
Time and Life Quotes
“Free time was the most precious time when you should be doing what you loved, or at least slowing down enough to remember what made your life worthwhile and happy.” — Amy Tan
“Life isn’t a matter of milestones, but of moments.” — Rose Kennedy“No such thing as spare time, no such thing as free time, no such thing as downtime. All you got is a lifetime. Go.” — Henry Rollins
“I always live in the present. The future I can’t know. The past I no longer have.” — Fernando Pessoa“With technology and over-scheduling, we are forgetting to invest time in simple connective moments with others.” — Michelle Gielan“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” — Andy Warhol“Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.” — Robin S. Sharma
“Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly.” — Ivan Turgenev
“People hurry so they can get to places faster, where they’d rather not be, so they can have more time to do things they’d rather not be doing.” — Peter Turla“Free time is a terrible thing to waste. Read a book.” — E.A. Bucchianeri
“You can have it all. Just not all at once.” — Oprah Winfrey“There’s only one thing more precious than our time and that’s who we spend it on.” — Leo Christopher
Time Management Quotes
“Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year — and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!” — Anthony Robbins
“Don’t make the same decision twice. Spend time and thought to make a solid decision the first time so that you don’t revisit the issue unnecessarily.” — Bill Gates“Rearranging your day around when you have the most energy is one simple way to work smarter instead of just harder.” — Chris Bailey“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.” — Carl Sandburg“The most efficient way to live reasonably is every morning to make a plan of one’s day and every night to examine the results obtained.” — Alexis Carrel
“A plan is what, a schedule is when. It takes both a plan and a schedule to get things done.” — Peter Turla“He who every morning plans the transactions of that day and follows that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.” ― Victor Hugo“Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.” — Peter F. Drucker“Time management requires self-discipline, self-mastery, and self-control more than anything else.” — Brian Tracy“The butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough.” — Rabindranath Tagore
Multitasking Quotes
“Multitasking is like constantly pulling up a plant. This kind of constant shifting of your attention means that new ideas and concepts have no chance to take root and flourish.” — Barbara Oakley
“Multitasking is overrated — I’d rather do one thing well than many things badly. Quality supersedes quantity every time.” — Stewart Stafford
“To do two things at once is to do neither.” — Publius Syrus“Multitasking divides your attention and leads to confusion and weakened focus.” — Deepak Chopra“Multitasking arises out of distraction itself.” — Marilyn vos Savant“You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus effectively on two things at once.” — Gary Keller“One cannot manage too many affairs: like pumpkins in the water, one pops up while you try to hold down the other.” — Chinese Proverb
“Be like a postage stamp — stick to one thing until you get there.” — Josh Billings“The shorter way to do many things is to only do one thing at a time.” — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart“Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth.” — John Medina
Procrastination Quotes
“We all sorely complain of the shortness of time, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives are either spent in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do. We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them.” — Seneca
“Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday and avoiding today.” — Wayne Dyer“Until you value yourself, you will not value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.” — M. Scott Peck“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.” — Alexander Graham Bell“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand, and melting like a snowflake.” — Sir Francis Bacon
“Dare to be wise; begin! He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.” — Horace“Delay always breeds danger, and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.” — Miguel De Cervantes“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.” — William James
Prioritizing Your Time Quotes
“If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got.” — Lee Iacocca“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe“There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.” — Brian Tracy“The most important thing in life is knowing the most important things in life.” — David F. Jakielo“We don’t drift in good directions. We discipline and prioritize ourselves there.” — Andy Stanley
“You gotta make it a priority to make your priorities a priority.” — Richie Norton“ ‘I don’t have time’ is just saying it’s not a priority.” — Naval Ravikant
Making Use of Your Time Quotes
“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” — H. Jackson Brown Junior
“It is not enough to take steps which may someday lead to a goal; each step must be itself a goal and a step likewise.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe“Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week.” — Charles Richards“Ordinary people think merely of spending time. Great people think of using it.” — Anonymous“Take care of the minutes and the hours will take care of themselves.”— Lord Chesterfield“The main problem with this great obsession for saving time is very simple: you can’t save time. You can only spend it. But you can spend it wisely or foolishly.” — Benjamin Hoff“One can only forget about time by making use of it.” — Charles Baudelaire
“As we speak, cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in the morrow.” — Horace
Quotes About Scheduling Your Time
“Starting every year, before I booked anything, or agreed to any meetings or conferences, we’d sit down with my assistant and we looked at our lives first. We planned that out first, and then what was left would be left for work.” — Michelle Obama
“I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.” — Golda Meir“One must work with time and not against it.“ — Ursula K. Le Guin“Begin with the end in mind.” — Stephen Covey“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” — Alan Lakein“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four-hour days.” — Zig Ziglar“The best time to start was last year. Failing that, today will do.” ― Chris Guillebeau
Taking Your Time Quotes
“There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.” — Mahatma GandhiBe the boss of your time — track it“Take your time. There’s no rush to be good or renowned.” — Kathryn Budig“If you’re really looking for something in particular, it helps to take your time.” — Billy Gibbons“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.“Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.” — Wyatt Earp“The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.” — Abraham Lincoln“The important thing is to take your time and not get stressed.” — Diane von Furstenberg“Haste in every business brings failures.” — Herodotus
“Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.” ― Voltaire
Quotes About Wasting Time
“Time is the one thing that can never be retrieved. One may lose and regain a friend; one may lose and regain money; opportunity once spurned may come again; but the hours that are lost in idleness can never be brought back to be used in gainful pursuits.” — C.R. Lawton
“Regret for wasted time is more wasted time.” — Mason Cooley“Time = life; therefore, waste your time and waste your life, or master your time and master your life.” — Alan Lakein“Make use of time, let not advantage slip.” — William Shakespeare“You can’t have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.” — Charles F. Kettering“Life is flying by. You don’t have time to waste another minute being negative, offended, or bitter. If someone did you wrong, get over it and move forward.” — Joel Osteen“Time stays long enough for those who use it.” — Leonardo Da Vinci“Waste your money and you’re only out of money, but waste your time and you’ve lost a part of your life.” — Michael LeBoeuf“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” — Charles Darwin“It’s not that we have a little time, but more that we waste a good deal of it.” — Seneca
“Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends.” — William Shakespeare“Four things come not back, the spoken word, the sped arrow, time past, and the neglected opportunity.” — Arabian Proverb
Time is Valuable Quotes
“Time is a gift that most of us take for granted. We get so caught up in the busyness of our daily lives that we rarely stop and take a serious look at how we’re spending this gift.” — Cheryl Richardson
“Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the only thing he can’t afford to lose.” — Thomas Edison“Every second is of infinite value.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe“An inch of time is an inch of gold but you can’t buy that inch of time with an inch of gold.” — Chinese Proverb“My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.” — Steve Jobs“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” — Leo Tolstoy“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.” — Theophrastus
Time is Passing Quotes
“Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires.” — Charles Caleb Colton
“The common man is not concerned about the passage of time, the man of talent is driven by it.” — Schopenhauer“Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.” — Alice Walker
“All our sweetest hours fly fastest.” — Virgil“Time goes faster the more hollow it is.” — Carlos Ruiz Zafón“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.” — Albert Einstein“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.” — Michael Altshuler“The long unmeasured pulse of time moves everything. There is nothing hidden that it cannot bring to light, nothing once known that may not become unknown.” — Sophocles“Time flies. It’s up to you to be the navigator.” — Robert Orben“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” — C.S. Lewis
Funny Quotes
“Time and tide wait for no man, but time always stands still for a woman of 30.” — Robert Frost“Never waste any time you can spend sleeping.” — Frank H. Knight“Time is a great healer, but a poor beautician.” — Lucille S. Harper
“I’m going to stop putting things off, starting tomorrow!” — Sam Levenson“Time is money, especially when you’re talking to a lawyer, or buying a commercial.” — Frank Dane“So little time and so little to do.” — Oscar Levant“Free time is death to the anxious, and thank goodness I don’t have any of it right now.” — Jon Stewart“Enjoy life. There’s plenty of time to be dead.” — Hans Christian Andersen“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.” — Leonard Bernstein“I am definitely going to take a course on time management — just as soon as I can work it into my schedule.” — Louis Boone“Punctuality is the thief of time.” — Oscar Wilde“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately, it kills all its pupils.” — Hector Berlioz
Latest Thoughts
We really hope that you enjoyed reading these inspiring quotes about time.
Time is the thing that we rarely give a lot of attention although it is very precious. This collection of time quotes is a reminder for us that time is valuable and we should never waste it.
The above time quotes inspire us to make use of every second we have and make it counts. Also, they are a reminder for us to enjoy every moment in life.
By applying the wisdom from these quotes about time into our daily lives, we can enhance the level of mindfulness, that can allow us to wisely make use of every moment and enjoy even the smallest things in life.
