Quotes About Time

On a personal level, to think in time is to accept the uncertainty of life as the necessary price of being alive. To rebel against the precariousness of life, to reject uncertainty, to adopt a zero tolerance to risk, to imagine that life can be organized to completely eliminate danger, is to think outside time. To be human is to live suspended between danger and opportunity.

In these principles, time, in the sense of the continual becoming of the present moment, is fundamental to nature. Indeed, our experience of time's passage is the one thing we directly perceive about the world which is truly fundamental. All the rest, including the impression that there are unchanging laws, is approximate and emergent.

In 1914, a Finnish physicist named Gunnar Nordstrom found that all you had to do to unify gravity with electromagnetism was increase the dimensions of space by one. He wrote the equations that describe electromagnetism in a world with four dimensions of space (and one of time), and out popped gravity. Just by the extra dimension of space, you got a unification of gravity with electromagnetism that was also perfectly consistent with Einstein's special theory of relativity.

I'll describe the original approach of Barbour, but most of what I'll have to say applies to Gomes's version9, as well as more recent work of Barbour and his collaborators. A moment, for them, is a configuration of the universe as a whole. These configurations, according to Barbour and Gomes, are relational configurations, which code all the relations that can be captured in a moment, such as relative distances and relative sizes.

We have to find a way to unfreeze time-to represent time without turning it into space. I have no idea how to do this. I can't conceive of a mathematics that doesn't represent a world as if it were frozen in eternity. It's terribly hard to represent time, and that's why there's a good chance that this representation is the missing piece.

We seem to experience time passing as a smooth flow of moments. Barbour insists that the passage of time is an illusion and that reality consists of nothing but a vast pile of moments, each a configuration of the whole universe. You now are experiencing a moment. Now you are experiencing a different moment. According to Barbour, both moments exist eternally and timelessly, in the pile of moments. Reality is nothing but this frozen collection of moments outside time.

Basically, string theory is the development of this visionary idea in a context of a fixed background of space and time. Loop quantum gravity is the same idea but developed in a completely background-independent theory.

Whatever we most admire and look up to—God, the truths of mathematics, the laws of nature—is endowed with an existence that transcends time. We act inside time but judge our actions by timeless standards. As a result of this paradox, we live in a state of alienation from what we most value. This alienation affects every one of our aspirations.

Time is endless and ours. Love and Death are only the games we play in it.

No real ghosts, Ted told himself. Memories were the only ghosts adults had: Memories and regrets.

When you really deep down look at it, we go to bed every night, get up every morning, stay here for 70 or 80 years, and then we die.

Oh, thou divinest healer Time And thing sublime! That thou should'st gladly life's lorn nest Anew invest, And set before the eyes of man A deeper purpose, holier plan, And gently bridge the abysmal span, 'Twixt earth and rest!

With what tragic pathos do all men regard The child grown old whose heart cries!

In my judgment an organic machine new to nature never arises, since it always contains an infinity of organs so that it can express, in its own way, the whole universe; indeed, it always contains all past and present times.

I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.

Good advice is a wise man's friend, of course; but sometimes it just flies on past, and all you can do is wave.

Memory's oldest trick is convincing us of its accuracy.

Birthing takes nine months, and dying takes you all the rest of your life.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 30

Any fear of aging, I think, is simply vanity.

Doctora Zainab looks at her watch. I should leave. But Mai carries her book and sits next to me. She wants me to read it for her. I start to read 'This is the House that Jack Built' and I forget Doctora Zainab's presence there is only Mai's attention and Tamer looking at us. For as long as the book lasts, we are poised, no future, no past.-Minaret

The pathway to hell was paved with good intentions, but what about the wrongs committed for the right reasons? Were they included as well? Life had taught him that anything that starts wrong, ends wrong. In this case, he supposed that only time and its unpredictable mercies would tell. - Percy

said made her even more special. Even so, to avoid any unpleasantness that could develop, friends and family never referred to the adoption, so that in time the fact of it was almost forgotten or never known. But

I don't do regrets. Regrets are pointless. It's too late for regrets. You've already done it, haven't you? You've lived your life. No point wishing you could change it.