Lee Smolin Quotes

Human's can't live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human's are always thinking about the future or the past.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you're going to say, 'Where did we come from, what happens next?' The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.

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.

Happy is the person who knows what to remember of the past, what to enjoy in the present, and what to plan for in the future.

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'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.

Remember the past, live the present, think a little less about the future.

It's exciting being in the present. You're always reading emails, talking about the future, looking at pictures on Facebook of the past. But living in the present? It's almost a dead medium. I almost want to do a sketch about being in the present.

For some reason, I have a very strange conception of time. I am constantly hovering at some overview, more macro.

What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.

We think we’re in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

We all use the future to escape the present.

You have the illusion of free will, but, in fact, that illusion comes about because you don't know the future. Because you are a prisoner of the present, forever locked in transition, between the past and the future.

We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell.

Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.

Time means little; I never notice its passing.

No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.

I never think of what it's going to be like later. I only think in the present tense. The only time I think backwards is when I have to reissue something.

It's easy to spend - especially in this day and age - to spend your time not being in the present. It's very easy to be way ahead. What's tomorrow and the day after that?

Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simmple, sel-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.

Time is just an illusion. What you need is to live this very moment. That is all that matters.

There are two kinds of people: one who goes on thinking about the future, not bothering about the present at all. That future is not going to come, that future is just a fool's imagination. I don't think about the future. I am a totally different kind of person. I don't think about the future at all, it is irrelevant.

Time is an abstraction which, on earth, exists only for the human brain it has evolved.

Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.