Temporality Quotes

“Not forever does the bulbul sing
In balmy shades of bowers,
Not forever lasts the spring
Nor ever blossom the flowers.
Not forever reigneth joy,
Sets the sun on days of bliss,
Friendships not forever last,
They know not life, who know not this.”
― Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan

“Some ephemeral moments must be given a memory, because the temporality of an instant may radiate a twinkle of eternity.( "Crystallization under an umbrella" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long enough to give them the rest that they need. And I - who have lost my day - what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes?”
― Henri Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes

“The ditch once covered over, above it acorns shall be strewn, in order that the spot become green again, and the copse grown back thick over it, the traces of my grave may disappear from the face of the earth as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men save nevertheless for those few who in their goodness have loved me until the last and of whom I carry away a sweet remembrance with me to the grave."
Last Will and Testament (1806)”
― Marquis de Sade

“Everything that now exists, no matter how great and good it is, lasts for a time, fulfills a purpose, and then passes on. And so it will be with all the works of art that now exist; an eternal veil of forgetfulness will lie over them, just as there is now over those things that came before.”
― Adalbert Stifter, Indian Summer

“Then he asked my age and I asked his. That's the tradition in China. If we know each other's ages we can understand each other's past. We Chinese have been collective for so long, personal histories are not worth mentioning. Therefore as soon as Xiaolin and I knew how old the other was, we knew exactly what big shit had happened in our lives. The introduction of the One Child Policy shortly before out births, for instance and the fact that, in 1985, two pandas were sent to the USA as a national gift and we had to sing a tearful panda song at school. 1989 was the Tiananmen Square student demonstration. Anyway, Xiaolin was one year younger than me, so I assumed we were from the same generation.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“It is a matter for wonder: a moment, now here and then gone, nothing before it came, again nothing after it has gone, nonetheless returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a later moment. A leaf flutters from the scroll of time, floats away- and suddenly floats back again and falls into the man's lap. Then the man says 'I remember' and envies the animal, who at once forgets and for whom every moment really dies, sinks back into night and f og and is extinguished for ever. Thus the animal lives unhistorically: for it is contained in the present...”
― Nietzsche

“And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.”
― Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann

“We are doomed to live the feeling of being lost because temporal beings are doomed to feel this way; this is something that transitory bodies cannot avoid!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The realization that time can behave like another direction of space means one can get rid of the problem of time having a beginning, in a similar way in which we got rid of the edge of the world.

Suppose the beginning of the universe was like the South Pole of the earth, with degrees of latitude playing the role of time.

As one moves north, the circles of constant latitude, representing the size of the universe, would expand. The universe would start as a point at the South Pole, but the South Pole is much like any other point.

To ask what happened before the beginning of the universe would become a meaningless question, because there is nothing south of the South Pole.”
― Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design

“So dawn does down to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Like all things in life and games that we play, there simply has to come a time when it has to end.”
― R.J. Torbert, The Face of Fear

“In time,
everyone fades away,
transfiguring into
echoes that latch
onto our memories
and bleed our hearts dry.”
― Barbara Garay, Beneath the Surface: A Book of Poems

“But what about "time"? After all it is not a bundle in which past, future and present are wrapped up together. Time is not a cage in which the "no longer now," the "not yet now," and the "now" are cooped up together. How do matters stand with "time"? They stand thus: time goes. And it goes in that it passes away. The passing of time is, of course, a coming, but a coming which goes, in passing away. What comes in time never comes to stay, but to go. What comes in time always bears beforehand the mark of going past and passing away. This is why everything temporal is regarded simply as what is transitory.”
― Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?

“The Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin, director of the Psychiatric Hos- pital of Kyoto and translator of Binswanger, sought to deepen Heidegger’s anal- ysis of temporality in Being and Time with reference to a classification of the fundamental types of mental illness. To this end he made use of the Latin for- mula post festum (literally, “after the celebration”), which indicates an irreparable past, an arrival at things that are already done. Post festum is symmetrically dis- tinguished from ante festum (“before the celebration”) and intra festum (“during the celebration”).
Post festum temporality is that of the melancholic, who always experiences his own “I” in the form of an “I was,” of an irrecoverably accomplished past with respect to which one can only be in debt. This experience of time corresponds in Heidegger to Dasein’s Being-thrown, its finding itself always already abandoned to a factual situation beyond which it can never venture. There is thus a kind of constitutive “melancholy” of human Dasein, which is always late with respect to itself, having always already missed its “celebration.”
Ante festum temporality corresponds to the experience of the schizophrenic, in which the direction of the melancholic’s orientation toward the past is in- verted. For the schizophrenic, the “I” is never a certain possession; it is always something to be attained, and the schizophrenic therefore always lives time in the form of anticipation. “The ‘I’ of the schizophrenic,” Kimura Bin writes, “is not the ‘I’ of the ‘already been’; it is not tied to a duty. In other words, it is not the post festum ‘I’ of the melancholic, which can only be spoken of in terms of a past and a debt. . . . Instead, the essential point here is the problem of one’s own possibility of being oneself, the problem of the certainty of becoming oneself and, therefore, the risk of possibly being alienated from oneself” (Kimura Bin 1992: 79). In Being and Time, the schizophrenic’s temporality corresponds to the primacy of the future in the form of projection and anticipation. Precisely because its experience of time originally temporalizes itself on the basis of the future, Dasein can be defined by Heidegger as “the being for whom, in its very Being, Being is always at issue” and also as “in its Being always already anticipat- ing itself.” But precisely for this reason, Dasein is constitutively schizophrenic; it always risks missing itself and not being present at its own “celebration.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the giants.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“The year 1946 was the watershed: generations born after that were increasingly exposed to the new, poorer orthographic style and gradually became reluctant to read anything written before the changes unless it was rewritten in that style.”
― Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English

“With time involved, everything is temporary.”
― David Benedict Zumbo

“I would rather call evolution an "emergence myth" than an origin myth: it's an ongoing, nonlinear story in which past, present, and future all communicate with each other.”
― Tom Idema, Environmental Posthumanism in Literature and Science: Stages of Transmutation

“Then for a brief moment he saw everything completely differently. Open space, empty and endless, stretched away in all “directions. Everything within this dead expanse, every living thing was helpless and alone. Things were happening by accident, and when the accident failed, automatic law appeared – the rhythmical machinery of nature, the cogs and pistons of history, conformity with the rules that was rotting from the inside and crumbling to dust. Cold and sorrow reigned everywhere. Every creature was trying to huddle up to something, to cling to something, to things, to each other, but all that resulted was suffering and despair.

The quality of what Izydor saw was temporality. Under a colourful outer coating everything was merging in collapse, decay, and destruction.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times

“For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evalua­ tion of the interrelationships among the components of the present- day society.”
― Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology

“Cultivated crops, like words, like language, are things that glide into view out of the murkiness of the past. I think of my words as mine, but the chances are than even after fifty or sixty or seventy years of chewing on them, writing them down, word-processing them as a speaker and as a writer, I won't succeed in putting a single new one into circulation. Same with plants, with crops, as a gardener and farmer. What we're given in words and cultivated plants has been worked over for hundreds of generations before it comes to us, and the chances of our adding to it are very slim. What we add is illusion: each time we're born, the world looks new, is new, which gives us a strange kind of leverage against the weight of accumulated biological and cultural existence, which means for a while, off and on, now and then, under certain circumstances, we believe we are the owners or managers or the franchise operators of this world, not the other way around, and that we have invented almost everything in sight, from the words that drop so easily from our mouths to the plants we grow in our gardens.”
― Stanley Crawford, A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm

“All the propositions of ontology are Temporal propositions. Their truths unveil structures and possibilities of being in the light of Temporality. All ontological propositions have the character of Temporal truth, veritas temporalis.”
― Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology

“Though it bore some semblance of a perpetual immanence; in truth, it was a prescient and persistent presence, enthralled in a cyclic temporality.”
― George Josse

“Think of the new conception of time, Digital Presentism, like real-time streaming of progressively generated content in immersive virtual reality. We’re all familiar with online music streaming, too: When you stream music online, every bit is discretely rendered, interpreted and finally interwoven into your unitary experiential reality. Only with Digital Presentism 'music' is also being created in 'real time' as if right from your mind... Since time can’t be absolute but is always subjective, Digital Presentism revolves around observer-centric temporality. What we call ‘time’ is a sequential change between static perceptual 'frames,' it’s an emergent phenomenon, 'a moving image of eternity' as Plato famously said more than two millennia ago.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics

“Even goodness shackled a person. Every concept bound. We all built houses on the sand, destined to fade away in dust.”
― Karan Bajaj, The Yoga of Max's Discontent

“The union of two natures for a time is so great”
― Margaret Fuller

“It is hard to notice what you see every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“An altogether different temporality is inherent in information. It is a phenomenon of atomized time, namely of point-time. [...]

Atomized time is a discontinuous time. There is nothing to bind events together and thus found a connection, a duration. The senses are therefore confronted with the unexpected and sudden, which, in turn, produces a diffuse feeling of anxiety. Atomization, individualization and discontinuity are also responsible for various forms of violence.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering