Quotes About Time

Boatfinder, tell me, from the frozen time into the flowing time, is there a bridge?' His smile was wistful, filled with longing. 'There is.' 'But you cannot cross it.' 'No.' 'Because it's burning.' 'Yes, witch, the bridge burns.

Varandas squatted opposite Hood. 'What are you doing?' 'I am ending time' 'No wonder it's taking so long.

I have lived centuries, yet what do I know of my own past? Where are my memories? How can I judge my own life without such knowledge?' 'Some would consider your curse a gift,' Mappo said, a flicker of sadness passing across his features.

Such was my journey Leagues across centuries In one blink of the sun.

Age did such things, feeding the desire then starving the will.

But what mattered beyond just that? This single moment, pitching headlong into the next one, over and over again, as firm and true as each step he took

You will find a balance. Whence comes the answer to sadness few can predict, but it does come, in time, and you will learn to appreciate pleasure for the gift that it is.

When we speak of ancient times, Rud Elalle, we find in our words things far nearer to hand, and all those emotions we imagined new, blazing with our own youth, we find to be ancient beyond imagining. -- Silchas Ruin

Rush to death. The longer one lives, the less valued is that life. What is that?

The future, my friend, is ever turned away, even when it faces us.

The past was both dead and alive, but between them it was simply dead.

Innocence,' she whispered. The one thing we all leave behind, alas. The one thing we all walk away from, sooner or later. Oh yes, you can look back and call it ignorance instead. But you do that because you've forgotten what you lost.

With sufficient distance, even a range of mountains could look flat, the valleys between each peak unseen. In the same manner, lives and deaths, mortality's peaks and valleys, could be levelled.

Kallor shrugged. '[...] I have walked this land when the T'lan Imass were but children. I have commanded armies a hundred thousand strong. I have spread the fire of my wrath across entire continents, and sat alone upon tall thrones. Do you grasp the meaning of this?' 'Yes,' [said Caladan Brood.] 'You never learn.

Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, was passionate about seeking to improve meetings. He once wrote, "Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment worth $2,000, you shouldn't let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers." A poorly conducted and unnecessary meeting is indeed a form of time theft, a theft that can be prevented.

It screamed downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expanded in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as they were. Then the visible world exploded.

More generally, when a nonchaotic system is disturbed slightly, the disturbance either doesn't grow at all or else grows very mildly, increasing in proportion to how much time has passed. One says that the errors grow no faster than linearly in time.

The amount of time we can successfully predict the state of a chaotic system depends on three things: how much error we're willing to tolerate in the forecast; how precisely we can measure the initial state of the system; and a time scale that's beyond our control, called the Lyapunov time, which depends on the inherent dynamics of the system itself.

Lyapunov time sets a horizon beyond which acceptable prediction becomes impossible. For a chaotic electrical circuit, the horizon is something like a thousandth of a second; for the weather, it's unknown but seems to be a few days; and for the solar system itself, five million years.

All of calculus, and hence all of theoretical physics, hinges on this assumption of continuous space and time. That assumption of continuity has been resoundingly successful so far.

At such small scales, space and time might seethe and roil at random. They might fluctuate like bubbling foam.

To grasp how different a million is from a billion, think about it like this: A million seconds is a little under two weeks; a billion seconds is about thirty-two years.

Our place in the universe, the universe itself, it all changes faster and faster by the second. Every one of us standing on this planet, we're all moving forwards and we're never ever coming back. The truth is, stillness is an idea, a dream. It's the thought of friendly, welcoming lights still shining in all the places we've been forced to abandon.

The dreamtime of creative work is a turnstile to eternity. (from Workbok)