Key takeaways
- "Time is money" is genuinely Benjamin Franklin's: it opens his Advice to a Young Tradesman, dated July 21, 1748.
- Franklin's other famous time lines come from his almanac: "Lost Time is never found again" first appeared in Poor Richard Improved for 1748 and returned in the 1758 preface later known as The Way to Wealth.
- The popular Seneca line about wasting time is a modern rendering; Aubrey Stewart's translation reads "We do not have a very short time assigned to us, but we lose a great deal of it."
- Shakespeare wrote some of the sharpest time quotes in English, from "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me" to "Better three hours too soon than a minute too late."
- The exact proverb "time and tide wait for no man" does not appear in Chaucer, but his Clerk's Tale says nearly the same thing.
Time quotes are everywhere, and most of them arrive without a source. That matters more than it seems, because the real versions are often better: sharper, stranger, and attached to a story.
This collection checks each line against a primary text. Franklin's come from the papers on Founders Online, run by the National Archives; Seneca and Marcus Aurelius come from named public-domain translations; Shakespeare's come with act and scene. It also answers the question behind one of the most searched lines: who said time is money?
What are the most famous time quotes?
The most famous time quotes are Franklin's "Time is money," Seneca's line about wasting the time we have, and Shakespeare's "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow." The table gives the exact wording and location for each quote in this guide.
| Quote | Source | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| "Remember that Time is Money." | Benjamin Franklin | Advice to a Young Tradesman, July 21, 1748 |
| "Lost Time is never found again." | Benjamin Franklin | Poor Richard Improved, 1748 (repeated in The Way to Wealth, 1758) |
| "We are not poor in days, but wasteful of them." | Seneca | On the Shortness of Life, chapter I (Aubrey Stewart translation) |
| "Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years." | Marcus Aurelius | Meditations, Book IV (George Long translation) |
| "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me." | William Shakespeare | Richard II, Act 5, Scene 5 |
| "Better three hours too soon than a minute too late." | William Shakespeare | The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 2, Scene 2 (Ford) |
| "Ay fleeth the tyme, it nil no man abyde." | Geoffrey Chaucer | The Clerk's Tale (Skeat's edition) |
| "Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst." | William Penn | Some Fruits of Solitude, preface |
| "Patience and time are my warriors, my champions." | Leo Tolstoy | War and Peace, Book Thirteen, chapter XVII (Aylmer Maude translation) |
| "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in." | Henry David Thoreau | Walden, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For |
Who said "time is money"?
Benjamin Franklin said it, in a short piece titled Advice to a Young Tradesman, written by an old One, dated July 21, 1748. It opens with the line almost straight away: "Remember that Time is Money."
He then does the arithmetic. A man who can earn ten shillings a day, Franklin explains, and spends half the day idle, has not only spent the sixpence his diversion cost; he has also thrown away the five shillings he could have earned. The point is not that time can be sold. It is that idle time has a price you never see on a bill.
The Founders Online notes add that later printings dropped the title and signed the piece "An old Tradesman," which helps explain why the line often circulates with no source at all.
What did Benjamin Franklin say about wasting time?
Franklin's best lines about wasting time come from one speech by his character Father Abraham, in the preface to Poor Richard Improved for 1758. The preface was later reprinted on its own as The Way to Wealth.
Three lines from it are still quoted constantly: "dost thou love Life, then do not squander Time, for that's the Stuff Life is made of," then "Lost Time is never found again," and the quieter one, "what we call Time-enough, always proves little enough." Each is credited to Poor Richard inside the speech, so Franklin is quoting his own almanac persona, a layer that usually gets lost when the lines travel alone. "Lost Time is never found again" is also older than the speech: it first appeared in Poor Richard Improved for 1748.
What did Seneca say about time?
Seneca said that life is not short, we make it short by wasting it. The idea opens his essay On the Shortness of Life, addressed to Paulinus. In Aubrey Stewart's translation, published free by Standard Ebooks, the key sentence reads: "We do not have a very short time assigned to us, but we lose a great deal of it."
The version on most quote sites, "It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it," is a modern rendering of that same sentence, not a different quote. A few lines later, Stewart's Seneca puts it more sharply: "we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them."
Seneca wrote far more about time than one essay. Our collection of Seneca quotes on time, with their sources goes through the letters and dialogues in detail.
What did Marcus Aurelius say about time?
Marcus Aurelius treated time as a current that carries everything away, and he wrote about it most directly in Book IV of the Meditations. In George Long's translation, hosted by MIT's Internet Classics Archive, he writes: "Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream."
The same book has his bluntest reminder: "Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good." The archaic "thou" is Long's, and it makes the line hit harder rather than softer. For more of his lines, our guide to Marcus Aurelius quotes and where they come from sets the old and modern versions side by side.
What did Shakespeare write about time?
Shakespeare wrote about time as an enemy, a judge and a joke. Four lines cover the range.
Richard II, alone in prison in Act 5, Scene 5, sums up his reign in one line: "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me." Macbeth, hearing of his wife's death in Act 5, Scene 5, gives the bleakest: "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day." Rosalind in As You Like It, Act 3, Scene 2, is lighter: "Time travels in divers paces with divers persons."
And the most practical, from Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 2, Scene 2: "better three hours too soon than a minute too late." Ford is plotting to catch his wife with Falstaff, which is not the context the line usually gets, but the advice stands.
Does "time and tide wait for no man" come from Chaucer?
Not in those words. The exact phrase "time and tide" does not appear in Walter Skeat's edition of The Canterbury Tales, but Chaucer wrote a close cousin of it in The Clerk's Tale.
Walter's subjects are urging their young lord to marry before it is too late: "For though we slepe or wake, or rome, or ryde, Ay fleeth the tyme, it nil no man abyde." In modern English: whether we sleep or wake, roam or ride, time always flies; it will wait for no man. The tide half of the proverb came from somewhere else. The waiting half is right there in Chaucer.
Which time quotes work as time management advice?
The best time management quotes are the old ones, because they describe habits rather than apps. Read together, five of them make a short working method:
- Price your idle hours: "Remember that Time is Money" (Franklin, 1748).
- Start early, because delay compounds: "Lost Time is never found again" (Franklin, 1748).
- Build in margin: "better three hours too soon than a minute too late" (Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor).
- Audit where the hours go: "Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst" (William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, in a 1903 printing on the Internet Archive).
- Play the long game: "Patience and time are my warriors, my champions" (Kutuzov in Tolstoy's War and Peace, Maude translation).
The Tolstoy line is often quoted as "The two most powerful warriors are patience and time." That is a paraphrase; Maude's wording is the one above.
Which time quotes work on a wall?
Time quotes work on a wall when the object does half the talking, and nothing says time like a watch. The Cost Is Time sets a gold watch under the line "The Price is Money. The Cost is Time," and Time Is Money puts a rose gold watch on a crumpled hundred-dollar bill. The can series takes a drier view: Borrowed Time, Still Ticking, Only Monday and Burn Rate each pair a watch with a crushed can, so the title carries the quote.
They suit a home office or study, where a reminder about hours lands every day. Each is one gallery-wrapped canvas, ready to hang and made to order in Europe, with a floating frame as an optional upgrade. The full range sits in the watch wall art collection, and if the watches themselves interest you, our guide to the parts of a watch explains what you are looking at.
Featured watch pieces
Frequently asked questions
Who first said time is money?
Benjamin Franklin is the source most people mean. The line opens his Advice to a Young Tradesman, dated July 21, 1748, and published in the Founders Online edition of his papers. He follows it with a worked example about a tradesman who earns ten shillings a day and idles half of it away.
What is the most famous quote about time?
Franklin's "Time is money" is the most quoted, with Macbeth's "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow" close behind. For a philosophical line, Seneca's point that we are not given a short life but make it short is the one most people are reaching for.
Did Seneca say life is long if you know how to use it?
That is a fair summary of the opening of On the Shortness of Life. In Aubrey Stewart's translation he says life is long enough for the most important projects if we arrange it aright, and that we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them.
What is a good short time management quote?
Franklin's "Lost Time is never found again" is hard to beat: six words, a clear rule, and a real source in Poor Richard Improved for 1748. Shakespeare's "better three hours too soon than a minute too late" works well for anyone who runs late.
Is watch wall art a good fit for a home office?
Yes. A watch piece reads as a reminder about hours without printing a slogan, which suits a desk wall you look at all day. Pick one strong piece above the desk, or pair a quote canvas with a pure watch image if the wall is wide.
