For us now not a single day stands still, not a single day stands still for us, they all fly away. It's gone before it's come. So of this very day on which I'm speaking, how much has already flown. We can't even hold on to this moment we are in now; it too flies away and another one comes, and it's not going to stand still either, but will fly away in turn.
Non ad nos stat nec unus dies. Nec unus dies ad nos stat: fugiunt omnes. Antequam venit, abscedit. De hoc ergo die, ex quo loquimur, quantum iam fugit! Nec horam, in qua sumus, tenemus. Fugit et ipsa, venit et alia, nec ipsa statura sed fugitura.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, December 17, 2023
Time Flies
Augustine, Sermons 65A.13 (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, vol. XLI A, p. 401; tr. Edmund Hill):