Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nothing is a bigger waste of time than regretting the past and worrying about the future.
I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.
The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.
I used to think consciousness itself was a virtue, so I tried to keep it all in my head at the same time: past, future, etc.
Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.
I spend a lot of time in the future, But to help the future, sometimes you got to go back to the past, and sometimes you got to stay in the present.
From time to time, there are moments when I feel that even the smallest experiences from the past can be applied to something greater in the future.
If you go around Colombia or Latin America, without doubt you will find that 80 per cent of the time, you're discussing the past and only 20 per cent about the future.
There's injustices within our system that we inherited from this time, from slavery, and until we confront our past, we're not going to be able to heal the wounds for our future.
I don't think about the future. I don't think about the past. I just think of what comes into my head at the time. So that might be about the past, that might be about the future. Or, the present.
I've been bothered about time generally and our tripartite division of time into past, present, and future. I think I know what the past is, and I think I know what future is, but I'm really not comfortable with the notion of present.
And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past - except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe.
It is this compulsion to look backwards at a time of crisis because one's got no idea of what lies ahead. There is a notion of security that somehow it must resemble the past. It's never going to. Just because we muddled through in the past doesn't mean we can automatically muddle through in the future.
People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.
The particular aspect of time that I'm interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don't remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can't turn an omelet into an egg.