T. S. Eliot Quotes

What happens today can affect what happens tomorrow, but it cannot affect what happened yesterday.

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

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

The present moment dies every moment to become the past , is reborn every moment into the future. All experience is now. Now never ends.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

Today is, after all, today, but yesterday is of the same substance as tomorrow.

The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness.

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

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!

Whoever said that the past isn't dead had it backward. It's the future that's already dead, already played out.

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.

In antihistory, time is an illusion.

I have wondered about time all my life.

I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.

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.

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.

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

There can be neither today without yesterday nor tomorrow without today.

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.

Destiny's Champion, Fate's fool. Eternity's Soldier, Time's Tool.

There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before.

If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable

Not Heav'n itself upon the past has pow'r; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.