Michel de Montaigne Quotes

If time travel were possible, you still wouldn't be able to change the past - it's already happened!

I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect is already in the cause.

Events are as much the parents of the future as they were the children of the past.

Yesterday influences today, thus creates tomorrow.

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.

The past has revealed to me the structure of the future.

The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.

Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.

This moment - the one you're experiencing right now - is the culmination of all the moments you have experienced in the past. This moment is as it is because the entire universe is as it is.

Even the absolute universality of the law of causality does not necessarily limit a person's freedom, because the law of causality not only enables him to explain the past and predict the future, but also encourages him to use his intelligence to create new causes and attain new results.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.

But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years.

It is an awful thing to get a glimpse, as one sometimes does, when the time is past, of some little, little wheel which works the whole mighty machinery of fate, and see how our destinies turn on a minute's delay or advance.

As the Wheel of Time turns, places wear many names. Men wear many names, many faces. Different faces, but always the same man. Yet no one knows the Great Pattern the Wheel weaves, or even the Pattern of an Age. We can only watch, and study, and hope.

Nothing that is can pause or stay; / The moon will wax, the moon will wane, / The mist and cloud will turn to rain, / The rain to mist and cloud again, / Tomorrow be today.

There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

The past is the father of the present.

By the needle you shall draw the thread, and by that which is past, see how that which is to come will be drawne on.

We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.

One alters the past to form the future but there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change.