Time

"If I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence; I become absent minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of time any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should we not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time Dimension; or even to turn about and travel the other way?"

"Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing."

"Killing time has never been one of my defter abilities, due, I believe, to my rather keen awareness that it is actually time that kills us."

"Time has two aspects. For civil and some scientific purposes, we want to know the time of day so that we can order events in sequence. In much scientific work, we want to know how long an event lasts. Thus, any time standard must be able to answer two questions: “When did it happen?” and “What is its duration?”"

"Trust no future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act, act in the living present! Heart within, and God o'erhead!"

"Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away."

"What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail [...]."

"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber."

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.""

"Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis."

"Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit."

"Omnia fert aetas, animum quoque."

"Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus."

"You've got to get yourself together You've got stuck in a moment and now you can't get out of it. Don't say that later will be better now, You're stuck in a moment and you can't get out of it. [...] It's just a moment, this time will pass."

"When your legs get weaker time starts running faster."

"You'll never know How I watched you from the shadows as a child You'll never know How it feels to be the one who's left behind You'll never know the days, the nights The tears, the tears I've cried But now my time has come And time, time is not on your side [...] How I watched you from the shadows as a child You'll never know How it feels to get so close And be denied It's a gold and honey trap I've got for you tonight Revenge, it's a kiss, this time I won't miss Now I've got you in my sight With a Golden eye"

"“They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive. Patience and time are my warriors, my champions,” thought Kutúzov. He knew that an apple should not be plucked while it is green. It will fall of itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree is harmed, and your teeth are set on edge."

"The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience."

"Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait."

"Time, that is to say, past and future, is what the false mindmade self, the ego, lives on, and time is in your mind. It isn't something that has an objective existence “out there.” It is a mind structure needed for sensory perception, indispensable for practical purposes, but the greatest hindrance to knowing yourself. Time is the horizontal dimension of life, the surface layer of reality. p. 126"

"Everything seems to be subject to time, yet it all happens in the Now. That is the paradox. Wherever you look, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence for the reality of time – a rotting apple, your face in the bathroom mirror compared to your face in a photo taken thirty years ago – yet you never find any direct evidence, you never experience time itself. You only ever experience the present moment, or rather what happens in it. If you go by direct evidence only, then there is no time, and the Now is all there ever is. p. 125"

"I recently met some old friends, a family I had not seen in a long time, and I was shocked when I saw them. I almost asked, “Are you ill? What happened? Who did this to you?” The mother, who walked with a cane, seemed to have shrunk in size, her face shriveled like an old apple. The daughter , who had been full of energy, enthusiasm, and the expectations of youth when I last saw her, seemed worn out, tired after bringing up three children. Then I remembered: Almost thirty years had passed since we last met. Time had done this to them. p. 125"

"Time is what the ego lives on. The stronger the ego, the more time takes over your life. Almost every thought you think is then concerned with past or future, and you sense of self depends on the past for your identity and on the future for its fulfillment. Fear, anxiety, expectation, regret, guilt, anger are the dysfunctions of the timebound state of consciousness. p. 123"

"The "second coming" of Christ is a transformation of human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from thinking to pure consciousness... Ch. 5"

"The essence of what I am saying here cannot be understood by the mind. The moment you grasp it, there is a shift in consciousness from mind to Being, from time to presence. Suddenly, everything feels alive, radiates energy, emanates Being.... In life-threatening emergency situations, the shift in consciousness from time to presence sometimes happens naturally. The personality that has a past and a future momentarily recedes and is replaced by an intense conscious presence, very still but very alert at the same time. Whatever response is needed then arises out of that state of consciousness... The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now - that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. p. 37"

"Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time - past and future - the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. Why is it the most precious thing? Firstly, because it is the only thing. It's all there is. The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be. Secondly, the Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Being. p. 36"

"To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the resent moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions. But without a sense of time, how would we function in this world? There would be no goals to strive toward anymore. I wouldn't even know who I am, because my past makes me who I am today. I think time is something very precious, and we need to learn to use it wisely rather than waste it. p. 36"

"All that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

"This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel, Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down."

"Psychological time does not conform to Einstein's physical time. If... my future can be my friend's past, and if my neighbor's past can be my present, then the past cannot be completed and the future is not yet to be made. Past and future must coexist with the present. Like a landscape extending as far as the eye can see, physical time exists in its entirety at once. The canvas of time stretches from the horizon of the past to the horizon of the future. All distinction between past, present and future is but an illusion. ...physical time neither flows nor passes. It exists as a single entity; it simply is."

"We all have our time machines, don't we? Those that take us back are memories. Those that carry us forward are dreams."

"The Unseasonable man is one who will go up to a busy person, and open his heart to him. He will serenade his mistress when she has a fever. He will address himself to a man who has been cast in a surety-suit, and request him to become his security. He will come to give evidence when the trial is over."

"Συνεχές τε … πολυτελὲς ἀνάλωμα εἶναι τὸν χρόνον."

"The future has taken root in the present."

"Diem adimere aegritudinem hominibus."

"Make use of time, if thou valuest eternity. Yesterday cannot be recalled; to-morrow cannot be assured; to-day only is thine, which, if thou procrastinatest, thou losest, which loss is lost forever."

"Since usurers sell nothing but the hope of money, that is time, they sell the day and the night. But the day is the time of light, and the night is the time of rest; therefore, they sell light and rest. It would not be right, therefore, for them to enjoy eternal light and rest."

"For the sake of research, the big picture and definitive conclusions, one would have to transcend time, in which everything scurries and whirls."

"Is it so bad to pause the future to appreciate the past? [...] Is it so bad to shut the door and just accept we can't go back?"

"Time was a flickering gray fire constantly consuming all things, so that what appeared to be motion was actually the oxidation and reduction of possibilities, the collapse of potential matter from grace to nothingness."

"No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent."

"If a congregation somewhere comes to life as Jerusalem at some hour, that carries no necessary implications for either the past or the future of that congregation. The Jerusalem occurrence is sufficient unto itself. There is—then and there—a transfiguration in which the momentary coincides with the eternal, the innocuous becomes momentous and the great is recognized as trivial, the end of history is revealed as the fulfillment of life here and now, and the whole of creation is beheld as sanctified."

"While Babylon represents the principality in bondage to death in time—and time is actually a form of that bondage—Jerusalem means the emancipation of human life in a society from the rule of death and breaks through time, transcends time, anticipates within time the abolition of time."

"The unique aspect of biblical faith is that immediate, mundane history is beheld, affirmed, and lived as the true story of the redemption of time and Creation. Biblical ethics constitute a sacramental participation in history as it happens. ... In this saga, time is transcended within the events of a single day—today—so that all that is past, from the first day, is consummated and is anticipated; so that today is esteemed in its real dignity, as if it were the first day, as if it were the last day, as if it were the only day, as if today and eternity were one."

"Come, sir, is time really so precious? Mine isn't. If yours is, all the more tempting to steal a little."

"I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and ... only in the moment when I posit myself."

"It’s not until they tell you you’re going to die soon that you realize how short life is. Time is the most valuable thing in life because it never comes back."

"Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded, and all the suns gone dead and cold, there'll still be time. Oh, God, what for?"

"I used to think I had the answers to everything But now I know Life doesn't always Go my way, yeah Feels like I'm caught in the middle That's when I realize I'm not a girl Not yet a woman All I need is time A moment that is mine While I'm in between"

"Time eases all things."