“Time is a created thing”: did Laozi say it?
Not in the Dao De Jing
No: “Time is a created thing” is not in the Dao De Jing; it shortens a passage by the Christian writer Elisabeth Elliot in Discipline: The Glad Surrender (1982).
Time is a created thing. To say “I don't have time” is like saying “I don't want to.”
Where it comes from
The saying is in no chapter of the Dao De Jing, and Wikiquote's Laozi page does not list it. Stefan Stenudd, who keeps a list of sayings wrongly credited to Laozi, traces it to the Christian writer Elisabeth Elliot: her book Discipline: The Glad Surrender (1982) calls time a creature, a created thing and a gift, and says that “I don't have time” is often a cover for “I don't want to”. A 2003 book credited the shortened saying to her; the first book he found crediting it to Laozi is from 2004. We have not seen these pages ourselves.
Nothing like it in the Dao De Jing
For Elliot, time is created by God and given to us to use faithfully; the shortened saying makes it sound like an excuse we invent. Neither idea is in the Dao De Jing, which never takes time as its subject, and no line comes close.