Clock, n.: A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him.

Philosophers used to ask whether we are born with or invent our sense of time. Now we know that we have clocks woven into every one of our cells. Philosophers also used to ask how we know that the sun will rise tomorrow. In a sense we have that answer built into us, too. The clock is a kind of orrery in the heart of every one of our cells, revolving to help us keep time with our world, a model of the cosmos inside our heads that cycles whether we are in or out of sight of the sun. The revolution of the stars and the seasons is written in the turns of our DNA.

We are all of us clocks whose faces tell the passing years.

We spend our lives on the run: we get up by the clock, eat and sleep by the clock, get up again, go to work - and then we retire. And what do they give us? A fucking clock.

A Clock is not time; it's numbers and springs. Pay it no mind.

the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. Indeed, as Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.

The best tool for a balanced life is the clock.

On an analog clock face, you can see where time has been a minute ago and where it is going. What really matters when our time is up are not the things we have acquired but the love that we have given away.

When we were only several hundred-thousand years old, we built stone circles, water clocks. Later, someone forged an iron spring, set clockwork running, imagined grid-lines on a globe. Cathedrals are like machines defining the soul; bells of clock towers stitch the sleeper’s dreams together. You see? So we’ve always been on our way to this new place — that is no place, really — but is real. It’s our nature to represent: we’re the animal that represents, the sole and only maker of maps. And if our weakness has been to confuse the bright and bloody colors of our calendars with the true weather of days, and the parchment’s territory of our maps with the lands spread out before us — never mind. We've always been on our way to this new place — that is no place, really — but is real.

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.

Are we what we do with time, or are we what time does with us?

A particularly significant example of brain against body, or measures against matter, is urban man’s total slavery to clocks. A clock is a convenient device for arranging to meet a friend, or for helping people to do things together, although things of this kind happened long before they were invented. Clocks should not be smashed; they should simply be kept in their place. And they are very much out of place when we try to adapt our biological rhythms of eating, sleeping, evacuation, working, and relaxing to their uniform circular rotation. Our slavery to these mechanical drill masters has gone so far and our whole culture is so involved with it that reform is a forlorn hope; without them civilization would collapse entirely. A less brainy culture would learn to synchronize its body rhythms rather than its clocks.

One test of a true clock is its ability to keep time through a wide range of temperatures. A clock that speeds up in hot weather and slows down in cold weather is not a clock, although it may make a good thermometer.

Oh, I say under my breath. Tick, tock. My eyes sweep around the full circle of the arena and I know she's right. Tick, tock. This is a clock.