Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future.

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.

Old is always fifteen years from now.

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.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

We live in the present, we dream of the future and we learn eternal truths from the past.

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward-toward what?

The future is an infinite succession of presents.

Every second that passes is like a door that opens to allow in what has not yet happened, what we call the future, but, to challenge the contradictory nature of what we have just said, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the future is just an immense void, that the future is just the time on which the eternal present feeds.

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.

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

Past and to come, seems best; things present, worse.

The future will soon be a thing of the past.

The past is over; the present is fleeting; we live in the future.

The mind exists in time, in fact the mind is time; it exists in the past and the future. And remember, time consists of only two tenses, the past and the future. The present is not part of time, the present is part of eternity.

The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

I mean the future has become old fashioned.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

Not only is the past of a person with no memory inaccessible; his ability to think about the future is imperilled. Time travel, then, is ultimately - and paradoxically - an exercise in remembering. And without that capacity it simply cannot exist.

That was in the past - we're in the future now.