Milan Kundera Quotes

Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults.

We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn ahundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life.

Being Doctor Who, I used to look at the clock and know at half past four we were going to stop rehearsing - and that was a sad moment for me because I wanted to stay in this beautiful, unreal world.

Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.

Time is an experience in consciousness. It is metabolized as our biological clock. Changing our experience of time can reverse aging.

Life always is now, but the form the now takes changes continuously. Most people equate the form the now takes with the now itself, and so they believe there are many different moments.

On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many, many moments. Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not this moment? This one moment, now, is the only thing you can never escape from. The one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens. No matter how much your life changes. One thing is certain. Its always now. Since there is no escape from the now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it.

we who determine how quickly time passes.

Our bodies are the time machine.

Time is not a linear flow, as we think it is, into past, present, and future. Time is an indivisible whole, a great pool in which all events are eternally embodied and still have their meaningful flash of supernormal or extra - sensory perception, and glimpse of something that happened long ago in our linear time.

I looked upon a clock to find the truth. The hours were passing like ivory chess figures, striking piano notes, and the minutes raced on wires mounted like tin soldiers. Hours like tall ebony women with gongs between their legs, tolling continuously so that I could not count them. I heard the rolling of my heart-beats; I heard the footsteps of my dreams, and the beat of time was lost among them like the face of truth.

In an instant, our mind can carry us far away into memories of the past or fantasies about the future. Or we may get caught up in a race against the clock, feeling like there's never enough time. We say things like "Time is flying," "Time is running out," or "There are never enough hours in the day."

Time. There seems to be vast quantities of the stuff spooling around me in all directions, everywhere i look. Days and hours. Weeks and minutes. Years. The hard part, ive discovered, is filling it.

There is neither past nor future. There is only the present. Yesterday was the present to you when you experienced it, and tomorrow will be also the present when you experience it. Therefore, experience takes place only in the present, and beyond experience nothing exists.

A man finds himself seven years older the day after his marriage.

To beguile the time, look like the time.

The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go ?

Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried.

Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second.

I mean, time for me, I can make it go slow or fast, however I please. That's how I know it doesn't exist.

The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.

Time flows in a strange way on Sundays.

She'd have to propel herself into the future by whatever means possible or she'd be trapped forever in a place whose times had already passed.

The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative. A large amount of reminiscence is, by common consent, conceded to the drowning man; and it is not past belief that one may review an entire courtship while removing one's gloves.

And along with indifference to space, there was an even more complete indifference to time. "There seems to be plenty of it", was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch but my watch I knew was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration. Or alternatively, of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.