Quotes About Time

Time has a texture. Each period of waiting looms its own design. For Abigail, this one was shot through with golden threads. -Those Who Love, p. 130

Michelangelo felt ill. He asked himself if what he was feeling was fear. Yet he knew that it was something more, something in his experience akin to the sacking of the Medici palace, the deterioration of Piero, an awareness of the senseless destructiveness that lay inherent in time and space, ready to lash out and destroy.

Ci sono troppi libri che non ho letto, troppi posti che non ho visto, troppi ricordi che non ho conservato abbastanza a lungo

Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you -- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life. [ Letters of Note ; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]

Fifty years, I hackneyed, is a long time. Not when you're looking back at them, she said. You wonder how they vanished so quickly.

The final end of Eternity, and the beginning of Infinity

The soft bonds of love are indifferent to life and death. They hold through time so that yesterday's love is part of today's and the confidence in tomorrow's love is also part of today's. And when one dies, the memory lives in the other, and is warm and breathing. And when both die — I almost believe, rationalist though I am — that somewhere it remains, indestructible and eternal, enriching all of the universe by the mere fact that once it existed.

The Three Theorems of Psychohistorical Quantitivity: The population under scrutiny is oblivious to the existence of the science of Psychohistory. The time periods dealt with are in the region of 3 generations. The population must be in the billions (±75 billions) for a statistical probability to have a psychohistorical validity.

But emotion had come upon him after all. Not for fifty billion people. What in Time did he care for fifty billion people? There was just one. One person.

Changelessness is decay. A paradox. There is no decay without a change for the worse. Changelessness is a change for the worse

It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus.

The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all.

We would grow tired of it, Grandpa, if it were beautiful all the time. A little change from night to night is good for us.' 'For you, because you're young, Wanda. You have many, many evenings ahead of you. I don't. I want more good ones.

They don't want equal time - they want all the time there is.

It lasted for a long time, I believe. A very long time. It was a great success, but even great successes come to a natural end.

The psychohistoric trend of a planet-full of people contains a huge inertia. To be changed it must be met with something possessing a similar inertia. Either as many people must be concerned, or if the number of people be relatively small, enormous time for change must be allowed.

Why, they are so sure of themselves that they do not even hurry. They move slowly, phlegmatically; they speak of necessary centuries. They swallow worlds at leisure; creep through systems with dawdling complacence.

Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time.

I shall not be alive a half decade hence," said Seldon, "and yet it is of overpowering concern to me. Call it idealism. Call it an identification of myself with that mystical generalization to which we refer by the term, 'man.

Could he tell her any of this? Of course not. Could he tell her that women almost never qualified for Eternity because, for some reason he did not understand (Computers might, but he himself certainly did not), their abstraction from Time was from ten to a hundred times as likely to distort Reality as was the abstraction of a man.

centuries would yet pass before the mighty works of fifty generations of humans would decay past use. Only the declining powers of men, themselves, rendered them useless now.

Pero ¿podemos permitirnos el lujo de arriesgarnos? ¿Podemos arriesgar el presente por el bien de un nebuloso futuro?

Baley tried to picture a world as a sphere being lit and unlit as it turned. He found it hard to do and felt scornful of the so-superior Spacers who let such an essential thing as time be dictated to them by the vagaries of planetary movements.

It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.