Quotes About Time

A single hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of tortures.

What are we to do now? Must we hate the enemy to the end of time? The burden of hatred is the heaviest that man can bear upon this earth; and we should faint under the weight of it. On the other hand, we do not wish once more to be the dupes and victims of confidence and love.

I tried to lift myself above the fray; but, the higher I rose, the more I saw of the madness and the horror of it, of the justice of one cause and the infamy of the other. It is possible that one day, when time has wearied remembrance and restored the ruins, wise men will tell us that we were mistaken and that our standpoint was not lofty enough; but they will say it because they will no longer know what we know, nor will they have seen what we have seen. Maurice Maeterlinck. Nice , 1916.

Het verleden is altijd tegenwoordig. (The past is always present.)

How do we know that it refers to the past? That is the real problem of memory.

History flows neither from the past nor to the future alone: it reverses its course and, when you get right down to it, flows from all the presents.

There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another and demand to live, and confirm the powerful in the wisdom which the immensity of the risks and the consciousness of their own disorder had given them. The world is more present to itself in all its parts than it ever was.

Being is not given but rather emerges over time.

There is a temporal style of the world, and time remains the same because the past is a former future and a recent present, the present an impending past and a recent future, the future a present and even a past to come; because, that is, each dimension of time is treated or aimed at as something other than itself and because, finally, there is at the core of time a gaze.

There is an intemporal which works on the inside of time, which is, rather, omnitemporal.

While listening to a piece of beautiful music: impressions that this movement which is beginning is already at its end, that it is going to have been, or sinking into the future that we hold as well as the past—though we cannot say exactly what it will be. Anticipated Retrospection—retrograde movement in futuro: it is descending toward me already made.

It belongs to the real to contract an infinity of relations into each of its moments.

The generality of time, of a family of times, is derived from the fact that all these times are enveloped in a process of nature.

From the moment of conception and still more after birth, there is an encroachment towards a future which is made from itself, under certain given conditions, and which is not the act of a donation of sense. Birth is not an act of constitution but the institution of a future. Reciprocally, institution resides in the same genus of Being as birth and is not, any more than birth, an act.

The future must not be contained in the present, but neither is it something which would be added on to the present by an a tergo necessity. The future would come from the present itself. They would continue each other.

The...present is itself a transcendent: one knows that it is not there, that it was just there, one never coincides with it--It is not a segment of time with defined contours that would come and set itself in place. It is a cycle defined by a central and dominant region and with indecisive contours--a swelling or bulb of time...an institution, a system of equivalences.

Time is never completely constituted.

Time is not a line, but rather a network of intentionalities.

There is a self-knowledge that is not knowledge and is not self-consciousness; there is a presence of the past that is not in fact given in it, but also not what I will in the instant; and there is a doing that is not the fiat of a closed signification.

We are entirely enclosed in our time and institutions, we can fight against it only with it, indirectly, from the inside.

There is a ti,e inherent to Nature. This time, in Whitehead, is inherent to the things, it embaces us, to the extent that we participate in the things, or that we take part in the process of Nature. It is essential for us, but insofar as we are Nature. Subjectivity is caught up in the system of a cosmic time, in a subjectivity of Nature.

My possession of my own time is always deferred until the moment when I fully understand myself, but that moment can never arrive...in short, I am never at one with myself.

Time and space are horizons and not series of things. And horizons that overlap, one over the other. I read time in space and read space in time. A single great differentiation of a single Being.

There has to be an ideality which has need of time.