Jean Paul Quotes

I don't think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind.

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

The future is, of course, imaginary - an unreal place that I create from my expectations, which are made from my remembered experiences, especially repeated experiences.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

I only remember the future.

But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

Your past is just that, the past, a place within your psyche with no more reality to it then the picture of a castle on a postcard is made from stone.

We are always looking into the future, but we see only the past.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

Nobody ever lived in the past.

The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane.

Fiction offers escape but it also interrogates the world we live in, whether the past, present or future.

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

The mind exists in time, in fact the mind is time; it exists in the past and the future. And remember, time consists of only two tenses, the past and the future. The present is not part of time, the present is part of eternity.

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call reality? -- not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still...All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass...There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.

The past feels distant, even when it's near. The future feels assured, even when it isn't.