Quotes & Sayings About Sundial

Hide not your talents, they for use were made,
What's a sundial in the shade? — Benjamin Franklin

She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones. — Wallace Stegner

I took a stroll in the curious old-world garden which flanked the house. Rows of very ancient yew trees cut into strange designs girded it round. Inside was a beautiful stretch of lawn with an old sundial in the middle, the whole effect so soothing and restful that it was welcome to my somewhat jangled nerves. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Every so many years, he went to England to visit - judging by the photographs he showed us - a sundial and some oak trees. — Jorge Luis Borges

I didn't grow up in a small New England town like the one in 'The Sundial.' I was raised in an apartment building in Queens, not in a sprawling, slightly sinister mansion like the one where the Halloran family resides. — Victor LaValle

THREE DAYS LATER A MESSAGE WAS LEFT UNDER A PEBBLE UPON THE SUNDIAL." "'If it really annoys you, Hilton, we might go and travel, you and I, and so avoid this nuisance.' "'What, be driven out of our own house by a practical joker? — Arthur Conan Doyle

An inch of time on the sundial is worth more than a foot of jade. — Confucius

I wish you wouldn't have given the sundial bracelet to Terease"

"Why?" I question and press my head onto his chest, pushing my arms back into his open jacket and around his back.

"If I had it to lead me to my deepest desire, I know it would always be a direct path to you. — Michelle Warren

I suppose we all tend to remember only the happiness from our childhood, as a sundial refuses to tell the time except in fine weather. — Bernard Levin

If America is to be run by the people, it is the people who must think. And we do not need to put on sackcloth and ashes to think. Nor should our minds work like a sundial which records only sunshine. Our thinking must square against some lessons of history, some principles of government and morals, if we would preserve the rights and dignity of men to which this nation is dedicated. — Herbert Hoover

Autumn
The cheerful sundial;
it falls in the shadow
of thy leaves.
there
where your branches
brace themselves
against the gate of heaven — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Cambridge was run by a mixture of fogeys too old to be considered dangerous, and Puritans who had been packed into the place by Cromwell after he'd purged all the people he did consider dangerous. With a few exceptions such as Isaac Barrow, none of them would have had any use for Isaac's sundial, because it didn't look like an old sundial, and they'd prefer telling time wrong the Classical way to telling it right the newfangled way. The curves that Newton plotted on the wall were a methodical document of their wrongness - a manifesto like Luther's theses on the church-door. — Neal Stephenson

Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way. — William Gibson

She kept talking and she kept talking. I thought she would never stop. Standing there, I felt the sun pour through the windows, setting and rising on my back. The sunroom had become a sundial measuring the geological age of my psychological toture. — Paul Tremblay

There is something eternally satisfying about lying motionless for hours on end, watching the world move around us like the shadow on a sundial. — Fennel Hudson

On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree. This fruit has tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the split fruit pours forth blood and the halved fruit is a full bowl for travelers and pilgrims. To eat of the fruits means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings. So at dusk you leave the place you love, not knowing if you can ever return, knowing you can never return by the same way as this. It may be, some other day, that you will open the gate by chance, and find yourself again on the other side of the wall. — Jeanette Winterson

Like the sundial, my paint box counts no hours but sunny ones. — Arthur Rackham

A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime. — John Hodgman

And the time sundials tell
May be minutes and hours. But it may just as well
Be seconds and sparkles, or seasons and flowers.
No, I don't think of time as just minutes and hours.
Time can be heartbeats, or bird songs, or miles,
Or waves on a beach, or ants in their files
(They do move like seconds - just watch their feet go:
Tick-tick-tick, like a clock). You'll learn as you grow
That whatever there is in a garden, the sun
Counts up on its dial. By the time it is done
Our sundial - or someone's - will certainly add
All the good things there are. Yes, and all of the bad.
And if anyone's here for the finish, the sun
Will have told him - by sundial - how well we have done.
How well we have done, or how badly. Alas,
That is a long thought. Let me hope we all pass. — John Ciardi

She looked as if she were a vampire about to check the time - with a sundial. — Kresley Cole

The Bible without the Holy Spirit is a sundial by moonlight. — Dwight L. Moody

The two thought themselves alone. But all the while, one watched with the night-wide eyes of love. While they paced the pebbled paths between the silent flowers' spiked arrays, sage Thyme spied upon each pale sigh, peeping between bloom and leaf. And while they sat side by side and hand in hand on the stained stone bench beneath the spreading wisteria, Thyme watched unwinking from the midnight face of the mute sundial. And while they lay lazy on the soft grass, swearing the sweet oaths of love and longing, and whispering as they parted that though long lives might pass like a night and the New Sun sunder the centuries, yet never should they ever part, Thyme crept and cried, counting seconds that spilled with the sand from the hourglass, and scenting the soft breezes that cooled the child's burning cheek with his sad spice. The — Gene Wolfe

The history of men of science has one peculiar advantage, as it shows the importance of little things in producing great results. Smeaton learned his principle of constructing a lighthouse, by noticing the trunk of a tree to be diminished from a curve to a cyclinder ... and Newton, turning an old box into a water-clock, or the yard of a house into a sundial, are examples of those habits of patient observation which scientific biography attractively recommends. — Robert Aris Willmott

Old sundial, you stand here for Time:
For Love, the vine that round your base
Its tendrils twines, and dares to climb
And lay one flower-capped spray in grace
Without the asking on your cold
Unsmiling and unfrowning face. — Eleanor Farjeon

Because of what I loved at 7, I still get jobs in my 60's. Guess who got the job? Crazy Ray.
Ray Bradbury — Sherri Rabinowitz

I am a sundial, and I make a botch
Of what is done much better by a watch. — Hilaire Belloc

Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch. Even when the bulbs of the hourglass shatter, when darkness withholds the shadow from the sundial, when the mainspring winds down so far that the clock hands hold still as death, time itself keeps on. The most we can hope a watch to do is mark that progress. And since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, timepieces don't really keep time. They just keep up with it, if they're able. — Dava Sobel

I'm very damn wet!' he said aloud to the sundial. — F Scott Fitzgerald

'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh. — Victor LaValle

She was so ugly that her face could stop a sundial. — Rodney Dangerfield