Terry Eagleton Quotes

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.

There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.

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

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 isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion.

I have gone into yesterday and tomorrow and both were as real as today -- which is like the dreams of ghosts!

The past isn't real because it's history, and the future isn't because it hasn't happened yet. I like it, it hints at virtual reality, which I think is how we sort of feel about life sometimes.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

The great cosmic illusion is a hierophany.... One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity.

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 ?

I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.

I confess, I do not believe in time.

I'm really freaked out by time. How, for instance, what I did last week is not real in the sense that it's happened. It's just a memory that's filed away in my brain.

Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.

If life were a movie, physical reality would be the entire DVD: Future and past frames exist just as much as the present one.

Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.

We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.

All time exists. That is the truth.... If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind?

NOW is the only reality. All else is either memory or imagination.

A year's a long time, but it also flickers past in no time at all.

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible.

I don't have a past. I have a continuous present. The past is part of the present, just as the future is. We exist in time.

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

My hold on the past and the future is precarious and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn, further developments in order to be understood.