Sermon quotes on time
Augustine of Hippo
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
Aziz Ansari
I spend so much time on the Internet…I feel like I’m a million pages into the worst book ever, and I’m never going to stop reading.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Everything has its time and the main thing is that we keep in step with God and do not keep pressing on a few steps ahead-nor keep dawdling a few steps behind.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.
George Herbert
Time is the rider that breaks youth.
Martin Luther King Jr.
We must use time creatively.
Harvey Mackay
Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.
Norman Maclean
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
Mother Teresa
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
George Orwell
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Jim Rohn
Life is not just the passing of time. Life is the collection of experiences and their intensity.
William Shakespeare
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)
Rick Warren
The best use of life is love. The best expression of love is time. The best time to love is now.
Isaac Watts
Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten as a dream
Dies at the break of day.
The busy tribes of flesh and blood
With all their cares and fears,
Are carried downward like a flood
And lost in following years.
A.W. Tozer
When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection.
Richard Swenson
Margin, is the space between our load and our limits.
Margin
Bernice Johnson Reagon
If every moment is sacred and if you are amazed and in awe most of the time when you find yourself breathing and not crazy, then you are in a state of constant thankfulness, worship and humility.
Robert Banks
While American society is rich in goods, it is extremely time-poor. Many societies in the two-thirds world, by contrast, are poor in material possessions, by our standards, but they are rich in time. They are not driven or hurried. They live with a sense that there is adequate time to do what needs to be done each day.
A.W. Tozer
When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection.
Augustine of Hippo
For You [God] are infinite and never change. In You, ‘today’ never comes to an end: and yet our ‘today’ does come to an end in You, because time, as well as everything else, exists in You. If it did not, it would have no means of passing. And since Your years never come to an end, for You they are simply ‘today’… You yourself are eternally the same. In Your ‘today’ You will make all that is to exist tomorrow and thereafter, and in Your ‘today’ You have made all that existed yesterday and forever before.
Confessions
Anthony Bloom
Learn to master time, and you will be able—whatever you do, whatever the stress, in the storm, in tragedy, or simply in the confusion in which we continuously live—to be still, immobile in the present, face to face with the Lord, in silence or in words.
Beginning to Pray, Paulist Press.
Carl Honore
When mechanical clocks began to spring up in town squares across Europe, the line between keeping time and keeping control blurred further.
In Praise Of Slowness: How A Worldwide Movement Is Challenging The Cult Of Speed, HarperCollins.
Stuart Strachan Jr.
Leisure has changed significantly since the dawn of the internet age. A 2008 international survey of 27,500 adults between the ages of 18 and fifty-five found that people spend 30% of their leisure time online. Of all the countries studied, the Chinese spent the largest amount of time online with 44% of their non-working hours spent online.
Source Information from TNS Global, “Digital World, Digital Life,” December 2008.
Gordon Smith
It is inconceivable to think that God would give us so much to do that we can no longer spend extended time with Him.
On the Way: A Guide to Christian Spirituality (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2001), 72.
Tish Harrison Warren
The future orientation of Christian time reminds us that we are people on the way. It allows us to live in the present as an alternative people, patiently waiting for what is to come, but never giving up on our telos. We are never quite comfortable. We seek justice, practice mercy, and herald the kingdom to come.
Taken from Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life by Tish Harrison Warren. Copyright (c) 2016 by Tish Harrison Warren, p.113. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Kenyan Saying
Westerners have watches, Africans have time.
Malcolm Forbes
There is never enough time, unless you’re serving it.
Edward T. Hall
Time talks. It speaks more plainly than words. The message it conveys comes through loud and clear. Because it is manipulated less consciously, it is subject to less distortion than the spoken language. It can shout truth where words lie.
Henri Bergson
It is we who are passing when we say time passes.
Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 42.
A.J. Swoboda
Sabbath reminds us that “our time” was never our time in the first place. All time is God’s time.
Thomas Mann
Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins, it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
Chinese Proverb
Life just gives you time and space—it’s up to you to fill it.
G.K. Chesterton
The modern world has had far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn. People forgot that the human soul can enjoy a thing most when there is time to think about it and be thankful for it.
Walter Brueggemann
The world is God’s way of bestowing blessings upon us.
Our times are ordered by God according to the seasons of the year, according to
the seasons of life, according to the needs of the day.
Carl Sandburg
Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.
Speech, On His Eighty-Fifth Birthday Party, January 6, 1963.
Faith Baldwin
Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.
Edward Young
The bell strikes one. We take no note of time But from its loss.
Walter Brueggemann
People who keep sabbath live all seven days differently.
Ann Voskamp
Time is a relentless river. It rages on, a respecter of no one.
Ashley Hales
Our time is a precious gift that will be multiplied only when it is corralled by the good story of the gospel.
Taken from Finding Holy in the Suburbs: Living Faithfully in the Land of Too Much by Ashley Hales Copyright (c) 2009 by Ashley Hales. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Wendell Berry
Time, then, is told by love’s losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost. It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb…. No one who has gratitude is the onliest one.
Blaise Pascal
Our imagination so powerfully magnifies time, by continual reflections upon it, and so diminishes eternity . . . for want of reflection, that we make a nothing of eternity and an eternity of nothing. . . . This is a dangerous game.
Jeremy Taylor
God has given every man work enough to do, that there shall be no room for idleness; and yet hath so ordered the world, that there shall be space for devotion.
The Rule and Exercise of Holy Living, 1650.
Anonymous
You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God.
The Cloud of Unknowing, contemporary English version by Bernard Bangely (Paraclete Press, 2006).
St. Augustine of Hippo
And their heart would see that everything past is thrust back from the future and everything future follows upon the past, and everything past and future is created and set in motion by that which is always present. Who will catch hold of the human heart so that it will be still and see how eternity, which stands still and so has neither past nor future, decrees both future and past times?
Confessions
James K. A. Smith
Faith is a how and, more specifically, a way of living in light of an event.
Ludwig Von Wittgenstein
He who lives not in time, but in the present, is happy.
Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)
Cosmic time, which is determined by the sun, becomes a representation of human time and of historical time, which moves toward union of God and the world, of history and the universe, of matter and spirit- in a word, toward the New City whose light is God himself. Thus time becomes eternity, and eternity is imparted to time.
The Spirit of the Liturgy, Ignatius Press, 2014.
T.S. Eliot
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
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