Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

Nothing puzzles me more than the time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less.

In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me by a little. That doesn't mean anything. For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however tenacious.

Before 1915, space and time were thought of as a fixed arena in which events took place, but which was not affected by what happened in it. Space and time are now dynamic quantities... space and time not only affect but are also affected by everything that happens in the universe.

Conventionally, one looks at history as something of the past. But after Einstein, who knows what is in the past and what is in the present?

Imaginary time is a new dimension, at right angles to ordinary, real time.

Apparently, some physicists argue that time is curved. I suppose this means that the past is in some way still present.

Thinking about time travel may seem like something humans have been doing since the first caveman dropped the first rock on his foot. But, even to begin to imagine the possibility of time travel, your mind must be able to wrap itself around the notion of a past and a future.

As Einstein himself pointed out. He said we’re like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can’t see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it’s there.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once.

The future will soon be a thing of the past.

Philosophy... is the creative perception by the spirit of the meaning of human existence.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Hours and days and months and years go by; the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know; but whatever the time gives us in which we live, we should therefore be content.

I am 46, and have been for some time past.

Father died last year. I don't subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.

What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?

From 'the lesson of the moth': and before i could argue him out of his philosophy he went and immolated himself on a patent cigar lighter i do not agree with him myself i would rather have half the happiness and twice the longevity but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself

I think all this talk about age is foolish. Every time I'm one year older, everyone else is too.

If your car could travel at the speed of light, would your headlights work?

Since we are what we are, what shall we be But what we are? We are, we have Six feet and seventy years, to see The light , and then resign it for the grave .

What you call man is time.

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine, but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.

Aslan" said Lucy "you're bigger". "That is because you are older, little one" answered he. "Not because you are?" "I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger".

I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.