Quotes About Time

The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.

Entró. Ahí estaba el gato, dormido. Pidió una taza de café, la endulzó lentamente; la probó (ese placer le había sido vedado en la clínica) y pensó, mientras alisaba el negro pelaje, que aquel contacto era ilusorio y que estaban como separados por un cristal, porque el hombre vive en el tiempo, en la sucesión, y el mágico animal, en la actualidad, en la eternidad del instante.

The fact is that every author creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Mi memoria a veces se parece demasiado al olvido.

Dormir, según se sabe, es el mas secreto de nuestros actos. Le dedicamos una tercera parte de nuestra vida y no lo comprendemos. Para algunos no es otra cosa que el eclipse de nuestra vigilia; para otros, un estado más complejo, que abarca a un tiempo el ayer, el ahora y el mañana; para otros, una no interrumpida serie de sueños.

All our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.

Taught by centuries of living, the republic of immortal men had achieved a perfection of tolerance, almost of disdain. They knew that over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men. As reward for his past and future virtues, every man merited every kindness—yet also every betrayal, as reward for his past and future iniquities.

In death we shall rediscover all the instants of our life and we shall freely combine them as in dreams.

La ceguera gradual no es cosa trágica. Es como un lento atardecer de verano.

Others died, but it happened in the past, The season (as all men know) most favorable for death. Is it possible that I, subject of Yaqub Almansur, Must die as roses had to die and Aristotle?

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.

El pasado es la sustancia de que el tiempo está hecho; por ello es que éste se vuelve pasado en seguida.

It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.

There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.

Estar contigo o no estar contigo, es la medida de mi tiempo.

Today is tomorrow and yesterday.

One is allowed to change the past: the present is so stubborn.

Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

Nadie puede leer dos mil libros. En los cuatro siglos que vivo no habré pasado de una media docena. Además no importa leer sino releer. La imprenta, ahora abolida, ha sido uno de los peores males del hombre, ya que tendió a multiplicar hasta el vértigo textos innecesarios.

I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.

Una de las escuelas de Tlön llega a negar el tiempo: razona que el presente es indefinido, que el futuro no tiene realidad sino como esperanza presente, que el pasado no tiene realidad sino como recuerdo presente.

Ya cumplidos los cuarenta años, todo cambio es un símbolo detectable del pasaje del tiempo.

Sabemos que el pasado, el presente y el porvenir ya están, minucia por minucia, en la profética mente de Dios, en Su eternidad; lo extraño es que los hombres puedan mirar, indefinidamente, hacia atrás pero no hacia adelante.

Distance and antiquity (the emphases of space and time) pull on our hearts. If we are already sobered by the thought that men lived two thousand five hundred years ago, how could we not be moved to know that they made verses, were spectators of the world, that they sheltered in light, lasting words something of their ponderous, fleeting life, words that fulfill a long destiny?