Perception of Time in different cultures

Here is an extract form the book "Momo" by Michael Ende and below you can find some more quotes and sayings about time. They are here to make you think a bit about time - because "time" is the topic of the following videoconferencing session.

Libor

Momo
Michael Ende (translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn)

...
"So… you like it here, do you?"
Momo nodded.
"And you want to stay here?"
"Yes, very much."
"I mean, shouldn't you go home?"
"This is my home," Momo said promptly.
"But where do you come from?"
Momo gestured vaguely at some undefined spot in the far distance.
"When were you born?"
"As far as I can remember... I've always been around."
...."How old are you really?"
Momo hesitated. "A hundred," she said.
They all laughed because they thought she was joking.
"No seriously, how old are you?"
"A hundred and two," Momo replied, still more hesitantly.
....Lots of things take time, and time was Momo's only form of wealth.
...
Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time.
Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it. Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.
....
Exactly what form the right kind of life should take, Mr Figaro wasn't sure. He vaguely pictured it as a distinguished and affluent existence such as he was always reading about in glossy magazines.
"The trouble is… my work leaves me no time for that sort of thing, and you need time for the right kind of life. You've got to be free, but I'm a lifelong prisoner of scissors, lather and chitchat." ....“I‘m from the Timesaving Bank. Permit me to introduce myself: Agent No. XYQ/384/b. We hear you wish to open an account with us.“
...
"You're wasting your life cutting hair,lathering faces and swapping idle chitchat. When you're dead, it'll be as if you'd never existed. If you only had the time to lead the right kind of life, you'd be quite a different person. Time is all you need, right?"
......"Surely you know how to save time, my dear sir? Work faster, for instance, and stick to the essentials. Spend only fifteen minutes on each customer, instead of the usual half-hour, and avoid time-wasting conversations. Reduce the hour you spend with your mother by half. Better still, put her in a nice, cheap old folks' home, where someone else can look after her - that'll save you a whole hour a day. Get rid of that useless budgerigar. See Miss Daria once every two weeks, if at all... Above all, don't squander so much of your precious time on singing, reading, and hobnobbing with your so-called fiends. Incidentally, I'd also advise you to hand a really accurate clock on the wall so you can time your apprentice to the nearest minute."
.....
"How does the system work?"
The man in grey gave another thin-lipped smile. "Don't worry, we'll take care of that. Rest assured, we won't mislay a single second of the time you save. You'll find you haven't any left over." ...
[Mr. Figaro] forgot the men in grey but not his new resolution, which he believed to be his alone. The determination to save time now so as to be able to begin a new life sometime in the future had embedded itself in his soul like a poisoned arrow.
....
The odd thing was that, no matter how much time he saved, he never had any to spare; in some mysterious way, it simply vanished.
....
In their view, even leisure time had to be used to the full, so as to extract the maximum of entertainment and relaxation with the minimum of delay.
...
Daydreaming [the people] regarded almost as a criminal offence.
...What [the people] could endure least of all, however, was silence, for when silence fell they became terrified by the realization of what was happening to their lives. And so, whenever silence threatened to descend, they made a noise.
...
Old buildings were pulled down and replaced with modern ones devoid of all the things that were now thought superfluous. No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, more timesaving to make them identical. ...
The lives of the people who inhabited this desert followed a similar pattern: they ran dead straight for as far as the eye could see. Everything in them was carefully planned and programmed, down to the last move and the last moment of time.
...
People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming even poorer, bleaker and more monotonous.
...
But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had. ....
"Once upon a time, people used to like coming to see Momo because she listened to them and helped them know their own minds... They don't have time for such things, they say, but haven't you noticed something odd? It's strange the things they don't have time for any more."
...."SAVE TIME? WHO FOR? NO TIME LEFT? WHERES IT GONE?... IMPORTANT YOUR TIME IS AT STAKE... DON'T YOU HAVE A FUNNY FEELING SOMEBODY YOUR TIME IS STEELING?"
....

Quotes:

Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide. Mark Twain

When we are doing what we love, we don't care about time. For at least at that moment, time doesn't exist and we are truly free. Marcia Wieder

You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it. Charles Bixton

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. William Faulkner

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. John Archibald Wheeler

But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day. Benjamin Disraeli

How long a minute is, depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on.
Zall's Second Law

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

Time is what we want most, but... what we use worst. Willaim Penn

Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can't buy more hours. Scientists can't invent new minutes. And you can't save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow. Denis Waitely

I'm working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life.
Ayn Rand


- Time flies.
- Time is money.
- Ahead of one´s time.
- To kill time.
- To waste time.
- Time will tell.
- Take one´s time.
- There´s always a next time.
- Time and tide wait for no man.