Quotes

  1. "A slave is one who must produce wealth for another," the Brain said. "There is only one true wealth in all the universe. I have given you some of it. I have given your father and your mate some of it. And your friends. This wealth is living time. Time. Are we slaves because we have given you more time to live?"

  2. Because of the one-pointed Time awareness in which the conventional mind remains immersed, humans tend to think of everything in a sequential, word-oriented framework. This mental trap produces very short-term concepts of effectiveness and consequences, a condition of constant, unplanned response to crises.

  3. The future, the past and the present are intertwined, a weave that forms any point in time.

  4. A human lifespan is not always sufficient for a person to achieve greatness. To counter this, some of us have seized more time for ourselves.

  5. Do you wrestle with dreams?

    Do you contend with shadows?

    Do you move in a kind of sleep?

    Time has slipped away.

    Your life is stolen.

    You tarried with trifles.

    Victim of your folly.

  6. Just like a computer, we must remember things in the order in which entropy increases. This makes the second law of thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. You can’t have a safer bet than that!

    p. 147

  7. It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million.

    p. 73

  8. 'Time does not tarry ever,' he said; 'but change and growth is not in all things and places alike. For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. Yet beneath the Sun all things must wear to an end at last.'

  9. Time doesn't seem to pass here: it just is.

  10. 'I wish it need not have happened in my time,' said Frodo.

    'So do I,' said Gandalf, 'and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.'

  11. This thing all things devours:

    Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;

    Gnaws iron, bites steel;

    Grinds hard stones to meal;

    Slays king, ruins town,

    And beats high mountain down.

  12. There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

    p. 21