The past does not exist, the future has not arrived. The present is an infinitely small touchpoint between the non-existent past and the non-existent future. And it is in this, this timeless point, that the human being’s true life takes place.
“Time flies!” we are accustomed to saying. There is no time; it is us who are moving.
— After The Talmud
Time is behind us, time is ahead of us, it does not exist where we are.
I am composed of body and spirit. For the body, everything is irrelevant, because the material lacks the ability to differentiate. For the spirit, everything that does not originate from it is also irrelevant, for the life of the spirit is independent. But the life of the spirit means nothing either in the past or in the future. All its importance is concentrated in the present.
— Marcus Aurelius
Time is the greatest of illusions. It is only an inner prism through which we separate existence and life, an image that lets us gradually see that which lies beyond time, in idea. The eye does not see the whole of a sphere all at once despite the fact that the whole of it exists. To see it all, either the sphere must rotate before the eye that is looking at it, or the eye must go around the sphere it is observing.
In the former case, we have the world, unfolding, or seemingly unfolding, in time; in the latter, case we have our thought, engaged in analysis and gradual reconstruction. For the Highest Intelligence there is no time: that which will be, is. Time and space are atomizations of the infinite for the use of beings that are finite.
— Amiel
It is possible to imagine a thinking being which finds it easier to foresee the future than to remember the past. There is already something in the instinct of insects that makes us suppose that they are guided more by the future than by the past. If animals had the same memory of the past as their anticipation of the future, then some insects would surpass us, but, in actual fact, it seems that the ability to anticipate the future is always reversely correlated to the remembrance of the past.
— Lichtenberg
Our soul is thrown into a body, where it discovers number, time and dimension. It contemplates this and calls it nature and necessity, and is incapable of thinking otherwise.
— Pascal
Time does not exist. There is only the infinitely small present. It is there that life takes place. And that is why a human being must focus all of his spiritual power solely onto the present.
