time

"When it is sunrise at Lanka, it is sunset at Siddhapura, midday at Yavakoti, and midnight at Romaka."

"A hundred to you, ten thousand years, two Yugas, three Yugas, four we make."

"The Aitareya Brāhmana (VII.15.4), describing the merits of exertion, has the picturesque phrases: "A man while lying is the Kali; moving himself he is the Dvāpara; rising, he is the Tretā; walking, he becomes the Krita.'""

"The waning strength and stability of Dharma in the four yugas is graphically depicted by representing it as a majestic bull which stood firm on its four legs in the golden age of the world (krtayuga) and lost one of its legs to [ either of] the succeeding two yugas, Tretā and Dvāpara, to stand tottering on a single leg during the present kaliyuga."

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the cosmos itself undergoes an immense and indeed an infinite number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond […] to those of modern scientific cosmology."

"In the great philosophy of Brahma, such violent turns of the scale are quite unknown. It embraces vast stretches of time, cycles of human ages, whose successive lives gravitate in concentric circles, and travel ever slowly towards the center...."

"In the great philosophy of Brahma, such violent turns of the scale are quite unknown. It embraces vast stretches of time, cycles of human ages, whose successive lives gravitate in concentric circles, and travel ever slowly towards the center...."

"To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it... It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that when Western civilization discovers Relativity it applies it to the manufacture of atom-bombs, whereas this Oriental civilization applies it to the development of new states of consciousness."

"A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions."

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still."

"Long before it became a scientific aspiration to estimate the age of the earth, many elaborate systems of the world chronology had been devised by the sages of antiquity. The most remarkable of these occult time-scales is that of the ancient Hindus, whose astonishing concept of the Earth's duration has been traced back to Manusmriti, a sacred book."

"… We are accustomed to regard as real those sense perceptions which are common to different individuals, and which therefore are, in a measure, impersonal. The natural sciences, and in particular, the most fundamental of them, physics, deals with such sense perceptions. The conception of physical bodies, in particular of rigid bodies, is a relatively constant complex of such sense perceptions. A clock is also a body, or a system, in the same sense, with the additional property that the series of events which it counts is formed of elements all of which can be regarded as equal."

"The invention of the mechanical clock, and the significant perceptual shift that attended it, provides rich and underexamined context for reading Chaucer’s works. Among social scientists it has become “textbook wisdom” that the late medieval invention of the mechanical clock transformed ideas about time."

"The simplest and perhaps earliest consisted of an earthen vessel with a small hole in the bottom. This was filled with water up to a certain mark and the water was allowed to trickle out of the hole. It would empty itself in approximately the same intervals of time. It was perhaps used for limiting the length of public speeches and the like. In fact there are quite a few references in Greek and Roman writings which would indicate this to have been a fact."

"The 1967 General Conference on Weights and Measures defined the of time, the second, based on an atomic transition—specifically, between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of cesium-133. (See Physics Today, August 1968, page 60.) Although Cs atomic clocks remain the standard, their time might be running out. Their underlying atomic transition is excited by radiation with a microwave frequency around 9 × 109 Hz, and after decades of advances, a Cs clock’s frequency can be measured with a fractional uncertainty Δν/ν0 of about one part in 1016. But clocks based on optical transitions operate at frequencies around 1014 Hz, which gives them an advantage in the push for lower uncertainty. (See the article by James Bergquist, Steven Jefferts, and David Wineland, Physics Today, March 2001, page 37.) The current record, 9.4 × 10−19, was set in 2019 by an aluminum ion–based optical atomic clock at ."

"... Early clocks were inaccurate by as much as half an hour a day, and had to be reset frequently with the aid of a ; breakdowns were numerous. The energies of the early masters seem to have gone as much into ornamenting their clocks as into making them more precise, for the construction of human and animal automata, as well as astronomical indicators, was quite popular. Finally, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch scientist Christian Huygens created the that resulted in a vast improvement in precision. By then the clock was ingrained in the European way of thinking as the artificial model of the cyclical processes of nature, and it was ready to serve as the prototype for the mechanization of a variety of tasks that had previously been performed by hand."

"We do not know when men first began to use instruments which were at all similar to modern sundials. A stone fragment in a Berlin museum is thought to be the earliest known sundial, dating from about 1500 B.C. The Bible mentions what some authorities take to have been a sundial (although the meaning is by no means certain) in the days of , king of some 700 years before Christ ... About a century later the Greek philosopher and astronomer Anaximander of is said to have introduced the sundial into Greece."

"The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is both the outstanding fact and the typical symbol of the machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous. ... In its relationship to determinable quantities of energy, to standardization, to automatic action, and finally to its own special product, accurate timing, the clock has been the foremost machine in modern technics: and at each period it has remained in the lead: it marks a perfection toward which other machines aspire."

"By a clock we understand anything characterized by a phenomenon passing periodically through identical phases so that we must assume, by the principle of sufficient reason, that all that happens in a given period is identical with all that happens in an arbitrary period."

"But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work — and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream—but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world. One meets these occasions as quickly and carelessly as possible and retires once more back into the dream, hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza. But as the withdrawal persists there is less and less chance of the bonanza—one is not waiting for the fade-out of a single sorrow, but rather being an unwilling witness of an execution, the disintegration of one’s own personality ..."

"Oh God, midnight's not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two's not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning's not bad, there's hope, for dawn's just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three a.m.! The blood moves slow. You're the nearest to dead you'll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you'd slaughter your half dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that's burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It's a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead — And wasn't it true, had he read it somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 a.m. than at any other time ...?"

"The hour of the wolf is the hour between night and dawn. It is the hour when most people die, when sleep is the deepest, when nightmares feel most real. It is the hour when the demons are most powerful. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born."

"The Jacobin push to restart the French calendar with Year Zero was intended to create a new France, free of the vestiges of the past and able to be warped to fit the whims of the new ruling class. If you can control how we perceive time itself, you can manipulate society and culture in any way you see fit — which is exactly why the left seeks to gain this control for itself."

"The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory."

"Each solstice shows us that we can choose. We cannot stop the winter or the summer from coming. We cannot stop the spring or the fall or make them other than they are. They are gifts from the Universe that we cannot refuse. But we can choose what we will contribute to Life when each arrives."

"... an artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work, in my opinion, and we have been bored stiff long enough I think."

"Life’s solution builds a forceful case for the predictability of evolutionary outcomes, not in terms of genetic details but rather their broad phenotypic manifestations. The case rests on a remarkable compilation of examples of convergent evolution, in which two or more lineages have independently evolved similar structures and functions."

"It's weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it's literally the most predictable thing in the Universe."

"When what we believe we’ve mastered is no longer predictable we’re not fine. The world suddenly is a very scary place. It loses its charm."

"Men are often praised for their sagacity, but all the foresight in the world can't tell a double-yoked egg until it is broken."

"Surely in a matter of this kind we should endeavor to do something, that we may say that we have not lived in vain, that we may leave some impress of ourselves on the sands of time."

"Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives."

"While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction."

"Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time"

"Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future."

"A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future."

"In 20th-century England, an individual announcing that he was the son of God and would return after death in glory would probably attract psychiatric attention; but earlier generations might have regarded such claims as unsurprising."

"Belonging to a generation is one of the lowest forms of solidarity."

"Οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν. φύλλα τὰ μέν τ' ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δέ θ' ὕλη τηλεθόωσα φύει, ἔαρος δ' ἐπιγίγνεται ὥρη· ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ ἣ μὲν φύει ἣ δ' ἀπολήγει."

"It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous."

"The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next."

"There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny."

"Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness."

"It is generally supposed that conservatives are usually old people, and that those in favor of change are the young. This is not quite correct. Many conservatives are young people: those who want to live but who do not think about how to live, and have not time to think, and therefore take as a model for themselves a way of life they have seen."

"It is not in the nature of man—nor of any living entity—to start out by giving up, by spitting in one’s own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption, whose rapidity differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one’s mind; security, of abandoning one’s values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential."

"As long as an heir is underage, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. The heir is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. So also, when we were underage, we were in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world. But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir."

"Who is there that has never, more or less consciously, noticed that our whole education is calculated to produce feelings in us, i.e. impart them to us, instead of leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out? If we hear the name of God, we are to feel veneration; if we hear that of the prince’s majesty, it is to be received with reverence, deference, submission; if we hear that of morality, we are to think that we hear something inviolable; if we hear of the Evil One or evil ones, we are to shudder; etc. The intention is directed to these feelings, and he who e. g. should hear with pleasure the deeds of the “bad “ would have to be “taught what’s what” with the rod of discipline. Thus stuffed with imparted feelings, we appear before the bar of majority and are “pronounced of age.” Our equipment consists of “elevating feelings, lofty thoughts, inspiring maxims, eternal principles,” etc. The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age."

"Maturity consists in having rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play."

"It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts."

"As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability; under social pressures ... our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others."