Quotes About Time

1. Nature possesses a temporal character: it passes, like time. 2. Nature is only ever process: we only ever grasp it in its manifestations, without these manifestations ever exhausting it. 3. It is essential for Nature to pass. There is not Nature on the one hand, and its process as attribute on the other. Nature is pure process. It is comparable to the being of a wave, the reality of which is only global and not fragmentary.

If we want to understand the process of Nature in itself, we could say that Nature is the memory of the world.

The paradox of history...is that a contingent future, once it enters the present, appears real and even necessary.

We cannot say at what moment the decision is taken: it is always to be taken or already taken.

I function by construction. I am installed on a pyramid of time which has been me...Time is that 'body of the spirit" Valery used to talk about. Time and thought are mutually entangled. In the dark night of thought dwells a glimmering of Being.

The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.

The perceptual synthesis is a temporal synthesis. Subjectivity, at the level of perception, is nothing other than temporality...In every moment of focusing, my body ties a present, a past, and a future together. It secretes time, or rather it becomes that place in nature where for the first time events, rather than pushing each other into being, project a double horizon of the past and future around the present and acquire a historical orientation.

Reflection only fully grasps itself if it refers to the pre-reflective fund it presupposes, upon which it draws, and that constitutes for it, like an original past, a past that has never been present.

The 'associations' of psychoanalysis are in reality 'rays' of time and of the world.

What allows us to center our existence is also what prevents us from centering it completely, and the anonymity of our body is invariably both freedom and servitude. Thus, to summarize, the ambiguity of being in the world is expressed by the ambiguity of our body, and this latter is understood through the ambiguity of time.

Every memory reopens lost time and invites us to again take up the situation that it evokes.

It is a question of finding in the present, the flesh of the world an 'ever new' and 'always the same'--A sort of time of sleep. The sensible, Nature, transcend the past present distinction, realize from within a passage from one into the other. Existential eternity. The indestructible, the barbaric Principle. Do a psychoanalysys of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother. A philosophy of the flesh is the condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology.

The moment that one understands time as chiasm then past and present are Ineinaander, each enveloping-enveloped--and that itself is the flesh.

History, then, is neither a perpetual novelty nor a perpetual repetition, but rather the unique movement that both creates forms and shatters them.

There must be a presence of the past which is absence.

Perhaps there are never any masters except after the fact and from afar.

One day you're breaking hearts, and then you blink and it's decades gone and your heart attacks you.

I utilise all my spare moments. I've read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books. I collect ferns.

Physics as we know it will be over in six months.

So kehrt alles zurück, alles in ewiger Jugendpracht !

Remember; no matter how desperate the situation seems, time spent thinking clearly is never time wasted.

History is not an escalator.

And though age and infirmity overtake me, and I come not within sight of the castle of my dreams, teach me still to be thankful for life, and for time's olden memories that are good and sweet; and may the evening's twilight find me gentle still.

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.