Salvador Dali
Faust’s imagery of selling our souls to the devil becomes real every time we don’t follow our heart, every time we do something for money instead of inner passion, every time we conform to social norms instead of our inner insight, every time we sacrifice the sacredness of the precious and precarious time we inherit in favor of a materialistic goal. Blake talked about holding infinity in the palm of our hands and experiencing eternity in an hour and—as easily as we stand in wonder and appreciation of his phrase—we almost immediately sacrifice the insight on the alter of our consumerism, egocentricism, and goal-oriented delusions. Bertrand Russell challenges the common truism that “time is money” saying “to realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.” And of course time normally has a very different meaning for the young only seeing a vast horizon of future possibilities than for the old seeing only a very limited number of years at best. We much too easily sacrifice our full experience and awareness of time by rushing and “multi-tasking” in efforts to “save time.” As Seneca wrote, “Time discovers the truth” but only if we shed our fixations and open awareness to the real.
“They lived at a slower tempo and if they were aware of time, it was in the sense that its passage formed a hazy backdrop to their life. It was a measure, not a master.”
“The time of long ago is just like the present. Actually there is no such thing as long ago and the present or the beginning and the end... Both life and death are dependent on something else and find their unity elsewhere.”
“The value of time—being a little ahead of our opponent—has counted for more than either numerical superiority or the best calculations”
“Time in its aging course teaches all things, overtakes all things alike, and brings all things to pass.”
“[The problem] is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste so much of it... there is nothing the busy man is less busy with than living. [The wise] plan out every day as if it were the last.”
“See that you are part of a universe in flux and have a very limited time to clear away the clouds in your mind.”
“In this immensity of past and future time, what is the difference between living three days or three generations?”
“Time is like a river of events - each arising, carried away, and quickly replaced by something also quickly replaced.”
“The past is already past—don’t try to regain it. The present does not stay, don’t try to touch it from moment to moment. The future is not come, don’t think about it beforehand.”
“The bird of time has but a little way to fly—and lo! the bird is on the wing...
Ah, fill the Cup:—what boots it to repeat
How Time is slipping underneath our Feet:
Unborn Tomorrow and dead Yesterday.
”
“everything is timelessly equal, with no time frame of earlier or later, no better or worse”
“Monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, fragments of stories, passages of books, and the like all help save us from the deluge of time.”
“There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one. Talk as if you were making your will: the fewer words, the less litigation.”
“Know how to wait…You must pass through the circumference of time before arriving at the center of opportunity… ‘Time and I against any two.’”
“Everyone fears death and knows they will die but still continue to fool themselves into thinking there is plenty of time.”
“If you love life, do not squander time for that's the stuff life is made from.”
“There is one kind of robber who the law does not strike and who steals what is most precious: time.”
“Time sanctifies everything it doesn’t destroy. The mere fact of anything being spared by this great foe makes it a favorite with us, who are sure to fall his victims.”
“the future depends on the present, and the present depends upon the past, and the past is unalterable... the more the past and present are known, the more the future can be predicted... this is the foundation on which morality and science are built.”
“Space and time are thus vehicles of continuity by which the world's parts hang together.”
“There is a time for everything. Possibilities for everything exist only for a definite time.”
“An hour is not just an hour, it is a vase full of perfume, sounds, projects, and moods.”
“The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.”
“time, far from being an abstraction, is a concrete continuum which contains qualities which can manifest themselves in relative simultaneousness in different places and in a parallelism which cannot be explained, like in cases of simultaneous appearance of identical thoughts, symbols, or psychic conditions.”
“Modern man no longer knows what to do with the time and the potentialities he has unleashed. We groan under the burden of this wealth.”
“What more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another.”
“But time—all blessings upon it—takes pity on us. Time is a sponge, and it erases. The new crop of spring grass quickly covers the tombstones, and life pantingly resumes the ascent.”
“Yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream… let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.”
“you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had... And so it is with a city, a country, a race... It is only the past that lives.”
“Civilization is always older than we think; and under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names and very being have been lost in the careless flow of time.”
“Don't sleep, don't sleep, artist,
Don't give in to sleep.
You are eternity's hostage
A captive of time.”
“The reality of time is identified with the reality of the wholeness of wholes. The quality of the moment when a group becomes an operative whole determines the quality of the wholeness... and the span of wholeness cannot be isolated from the essence of the whole.
”
“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.”
“if time did not intervene, the polar forces facing each other on the same axis would balance each other so completely that all movement, and with it all development or change, would cease.”
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
“Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more.”
“Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.”
“The dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back—but... you can't go home again... you can't go back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
“There is no connection between I myself yesterday and I myself in this moment; there is no connection whatsoever.”
“Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment and suffering.”
“One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity.”
“For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For tehnological man, it is time that occupies the same role.”
“As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up.”
“time has no single measure, time can be like frost or lightning or a tear or siege or storm or sunset, or even like a rock.”
“the future is an evanescent dew, a shadow, a lightening flash, just as the past, just as now”
“Civilizations have been destroyed many times, and this civilization is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.”
“The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality… the moment of vision before intellectualization”
“Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.”
“Time divided into periods is... not a time lived, but a time viewed... The infinite player is us does not consume time but generates it... Time does not pass... each moment is a beginning... time is a function of freedom.”
“The new poverty in our country is time poverty. We need to recognize what’s missing from our lives and then make time for them. We need to live in the present, and try to experience a freedom from time.”
“The premature evocation of the future veils the present moment. Dwelling on one's good dream of the future and borrowing from others in the present on the basis of it is the attitude of pet dogs and cats.”
“The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.”
“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes—possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting”
“It was a strange feeling, as if he were recollecting the present from the future. As if time had somehow been split in two, so that memory and experience revolved within a closed cycle”
“The best thing you can buy with money is freedom, time. I don't know how much I earn a year. I have no idea.”
“The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.'
'What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.
'Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.'”
“You can break down the present into smaller and smaller increments, but between the instant of present experience and the instant you identify that instant as 'now', the moment has already passed. It is not longer now. It’s then.”
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