James Gleick Quotes

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

In spacetime, all events are baked together: a four-dimensional continuum. Past and future are no more privileged than left and right or up and down.

I feel as though maybe our concept of time and space is very limited. Maybe everything is all happening at once, if you know what I mean.

In space-time everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present and the future is given en bloc...Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.

The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.

My ideas about time all developed from the realization that if nothing were to change we could not say that time passes. Change is primary, time, if it exists at all, is something we deduce from it.

What is reality, anyway? Just a collective hunch.

Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?

Time is a mind construct. It's not real.

Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.

I don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality. It's only reality as we experience it.

True time is four-dimensional.

There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.

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.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

Time is very weird.

Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past.

What time is it? It is by every star a different time, and each most falsely true.

The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Two seconds are a thousand years.

Today is, after all, today, but yesterday is of the same substance as tomorrow.

Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day.