Julian Barbour Quotes

Time itself is an element.

So: if you buy the notion that reality consists of the things in your freeze-frame mental image right now, and if you agree that your now is no more valid than the now of someone located far away in space who can move freely, then reality encompasses all of the events in spacetime.

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.

Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.

Truth has not special time of its own. Its hour is now - always and, indeed then most truly, when it seems unsuitable to actual circumstances.

The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.

Yesterday you were thinking about today because then it was tomorrow; now it is today and you are thinking about tomorrow, and when the tomorrow comes, it will become today- because anything that exists, exists here and now, it cannot exist otherwise.

The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future. The cutting edge of the instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

Evolution is the only thing that exists through time. That is true for computers, or people, or a business. We tend to see things in a static way, and so you see what is. Even in looking at ourselves, what we really are is essentially vessels for our DNA that keeps evolving through time. So seeing that and embracing that reality, and thinking of everything as kind of this perpetual motion machine in which you embrace reality - you don't wish it was different. You realize that it's your puzzle to interact with. You interact with it well, you evolve yourself.

When you are truly meditative, there is no time and space for you. Time and space is just a creation of the mind.

There is, therefore, no difficulty in answering such questions as these. What cause was there why the Universe was placed in such a part of Space? and, Why was the Universe created at such a Time? for, if there be no Space beyond the Universe, it was impossible that it should be created in another place; and if there was no Time before, it was impossible it should be created at another time.

There are a number of countries that we see cyber-attacks emanating from. And, again, they can be just individuals who are located in the country. But three that I think are of special concern would be Iran, would be Russia, and China.

We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space - how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!

Being in the ring became my reality, and, in my reality, I'd think I was someone special.

Life always is now, but the form the now takes changes continuously. Most people equate the form the now takes with the now itself, and so they believe there are many different moments.

All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not yet emerged from it. Today is the only day there is.

I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common.

Reality lies far beyond space and time, and I need to know why.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future — which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now

There is neither past nor future. There is only the present. Yesterday was the present to you when you experienced it, and tomorrow will be also the present when you experience it. Therefore, experience takes place only in the present, and beyond experience nothing exists.

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love - from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter- to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behaviour of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.

It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.