Lennart Meri Quotes

Clock measurement is not time itself. In fact, so opposed are they that one could argue the clock is not a synonym, but the opposite of time.

In the industrial age and in analog clocks, a minute is some portion of an hour which is some portion of a day. You know, in the digital age, a minute is just a number. It's just 3:23. It's almost this absolute duration that doesn't have a connection to where the sun is or where our day is.

History uses a unit of measure for time that is different from that of the lifespan of the individual, whereas man is only too ready to measure the evolution of history by his own yardstick.

I've been bothered about time generally and our tripartite division of time into past, present, and future. I think I know what the past is, and I think I know what future is, but I'm really not comfortable with the notion of present.

Time-space as commonly understood, in the sense of the distance measured between two time-points, is the result of time calculation.

We parcel up time into years and months and days because without compartmentalisation the tundra of time is impossible to navigate.

Time is the measurable unit of movement concerning a before and an after.

If we are indeed nostalgic for the weight of clock time, it is worth remembering that the standardized time that most of us know has only been around since the mid-nineteenth century. It was invented for the railroads.

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?

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.

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

Time itself comes in drops.

I was struck by the way Europeans see history as something neatly linear. For me, it's not that; it's not some kind of straight railway.

I'm fascinated by the fact that we can't grasp anything about time.

In fact, I think when we carry out a complete analysis of time, I think what we're going to discover is that like matter, time is composed of elemental, discrete types.

First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.

I'm trying to understand how time works. And that's a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it.

History happens all around us.

Every white man seemed to have a great concern about time. We enjoyed time, they measured it…. Hours, minutes, and seconds were such small divisions of time that we never thought of them.

A man cannot be in the seventeenth century and the nineteenth at one and the same moment.

Is time our invention, or is time a real thing... I realize we're measuring it, but in the cosmic scheme of things, is there really time?

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border.

The test is the sixty seconds of every minute, and the sixty minutes of every hour, not our times of prayer and devotional meetings.

Time, like a preacher in the days of the Puritans, turned the hour-glass on his high pulpit, the church belfry.