What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I

The great bishop and seeker of divine truth, Saint Augustine of Hippo, once gave voice to a mystery that has confounded both philosopher and poet alike: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” In this confession, he captures the paradox of human understanding—that we live within time, we feel its passing more intimately than breath itself, and yet when we seek to define it, it escapes us like water through the fingers. Time is both the most familiar and the most elusive of realities.

The origin of this quote comes from Augustine’s Confessions, where he wrestled not only with the sins and struggles of his own life but with the deepest questions of existence. In reflecting upon creation and God’s eternity, he was forced to ask: what is time itself? We measure it, we speak of past, present, and future, and yet the past no longer exists, the future is not yet, and the present vanishes the moment we try to hold it. What then is this strange thing that governs all our days? Augustine, with rare honesty, admitted that he did not know—and in so doing, he revealed a wisdom greater than certainty.

The ancients too pondered this riddle. Aristotle defined time as the “number of motion with respect to before and after,” yet even this precise formulation left questions unanswered. The Stoics spoke of time as an eternal recurrence, while the Hebrews sang that with God, “a thousand years are as one day, and one day as a thousand years.” Augustine inherited this ancient struggle and gave it new voice: to live in time is to feel it without fully comprehending it. To attempt to explain it is to chase a shadow across the ground.

History itself provides examples of how elusive time can be. Consider Albert Einstein, who centuries later would reveal that time bends with motion and gravity, that it is not fixed but relative. What seemed absolute to generations of thinkers proved to be more mysterious still. And yet, though Einstein explained more than Augustine, he too acknowledged the wonder: time is woven into the very fabric of reality, inseparable from space, impossible to picture apart from creation itself. Both men—saint and scientist—stood at the river’s edge, humbled by the current they could never fully grasp.

The meaning of Augustine’s words is not despair, but humility. He teaches us that the deepest truths are not always those we can define, but those we can live. We do not need to master the definition of time to understand its weight upon our lives. We need only feel its swiftness, its scarcity, its call to use it wisely. To know time is to experience it; to try to explain time is to be humbled by it. In this tension lies the heart of human existence.

Therefore, the lesson is this: live with reverence for mystery. Do not be so proud as to think all things can be captured in words or reason. Some truths must be carried, not caged. Time, like love or eternity, is best honored not by defining it, but by living in harmony with it—by treasuring each fleeting moment, by remembering the past with gratitude, and by entering the future with faith. The inability to explain time is itself a reminder of our dependence on the eternal.

In practice, I counsel this: pause each day and consider how you are spending the precious gift of hours. Do not waste them waiting for a perfect definition of life, but fill them with meaning. Cherish relationships, pursue what is noble, and let mystery deepen your awe rather than weaken your resolve. Let Augustine’s humility guide you: though you cannot explain time, you can live it well.

Thus, remember the wisdom of Saint Augustine: “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” Accept that some things escape the net of reason, and let that awareness lead you not to despair, but to wonder. For it is in wonder that we find wisdom, and in humility before the mystery of time that we learn to live most fully.