Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.

Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.

The sands of time cannot be stopped. Years pass whether we will them or not... but we can remember. What has been lost may yet live in memories.

"Far-stretching, endless Time
Brings forth all hidden things,
And buries that which once did shine.
The firm resolve falters, the sacred oath is shattered;
And let none say, "It cannot happen here". "

Time's the thief of memory

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course.

The past was a lie, memory has no return, every spring gone by could never be recovered, and the wildest and most tenacious love is an ephemeral truth in the end

time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.

From the inheritance series book one Eragon.

Broom

The sands of time cannot be stopped years pass whether we will them or not, but we can remember.......what has been lost may yet live on in memories, that which you will hear is imperfect and fragmented yet treasure it for without you it does not exist.

We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of grater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our [forebears] sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Neitzche called the spirit of gravity. (p.236)

One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found — and it is found in terrible places. … For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

Oceans of time passing through space, beings and things – come and slip away. Like tears in a stream drift into the sea, no shape, no soul – faint memories of dreams.

Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.