Quotes About Time

The present is known. The future is unknown. The present is solid. The future is abstract. Ruining the present by worrying about the future is like burning your most treasured possession simply because you might one day lose other possessions that you don't own yet.

No, she felt homesick, not for a place, but for a time. Maybe it wasn't homesickness at all. Maybe it was timesickness. She just missed those days when she was younger - seven, six, five, four years old - when she didn't know so much about the world. She missed, most of all, her mother.

So every human inhabitant on this freak wonder of a planet shares the same core. I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.

That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.

A quark is not the smallest thing. The smallest thing is the regret you will feel on your deathbed for not having worked more.

Do you know how magic works? The kind of magic that gets reindeer to fly in the sky? The kind that helps Father Christmas travel around the world in a single night? The kind that can stop time and make dreams come true? Hope. That's how. Without hope, there would be no magic.

In a thousand years, if humans survive that long, everything you know will have been disproved. And replaced by even bigger myths.

I was already feeling a kind of homesickness for a present I was still living

Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?

You have the power to stop time. You do it by kissing. Or listening to music.

He wrote me a prescription for more diazepam and advised I take things "one day at a time," as if there were another way for days to be experienced.

And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live.

It might be a strange irony that the cure for worrying about ageing is sometimes, well, ageing .

Which is to say: don't kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.

The past is never gone. It just hides.

The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.

40 pieces of helpful advice: No. 31 - Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.

The future isn't real. The future is abstract. The now is all we know. One now after another now. The now is where we must live. There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you. Focus on that.

It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.

To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it.

But while choice is infinite, our lives have time spans. We can't live every life. We can't watch every film or read every book or visit every single place on this sweet earth. Rather than being blocked by it, we need to edit the choice in front of us. We need to find out what is good for us, and leave the rest. We don't need another world. Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything.

No wonder they were a species of primitives. By the time they have read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it, they are dead.

You make the wrong decision in the present and it haunts you, just as the Treaty of Versaillles in nineteen nineteen sowed the ground for Hitler to take power in nineteen thirty-three, so every present moment is paying for a future one. Just one wrong turn can get you very lost. What you do in the present stays with you. It comes back. You don't get away with anything.

I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.