Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires.

Charles Caleb Colton (1780–1832), an English cleric-turned-writer, is best known for his aphoristic collection *Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words* (1820–1822). The quotation fits the book’s moral-philosophical mode: compact reflections on human conduct, perception, and the limits of knowledge, written for a broad reading public in the early nineteenth century. Colton’s life—marked by a break with clerical respectability, financial strain, and eventual exile—often sharpened his interest in transience and the instability of worldly certainties. This remark belongs to that tradition of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment meditation on time as both indispensable to experience and resistant to precise definition.

Colton frames time as a paradox: it governs everything we do, yet it slips away the moment we try to pin it down. The past is irretrievable, the future only imagined, and the present is so fleeting that it turns into “past” even as we name it. The lightning simile emphasizes both vividness and vanishing—time is perceptible through its effects, not as a stable object. The passage also implies a critique of overconfident definition: language and concepts lag behind lived experience. In a moral register, the thought can press toward urgency and humility—our plans and identities rest on something that is continuously dissolving.