Mental Time Travel Quotes

On the human imagination, events produce the effects of time. Thus, he who has travelled far and seen much, is apt to fancy that he has lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents, soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.

Human's can't live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human's are always thinking about the future or the past.

Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this movie, but also scenes from this movie, which I think I have entirely forgotten, come back to me. Objects have this power, and I like it.

Most people remember being 4 objectively, as if they're seeing a movie of a 4-year-old. But me, if you ask me to think about when I'm 4, I can feel myself being 4, and I am there, looking out through my 4-year-old eyes.

I've already started saying that I'm 30 when I'm still 29. That way, I'm already there.

And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.

I try to look in the future and think backwards. That is when I am at my most comfortable. Because then I am just like the movie, 'Back to the Future.'

Why procrastinate when you can precognitate?

If I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence; I become absent minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of time any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should we not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time Dimension; or even to turn about and travel the other way?

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.

We think of our future as anticipated memories.

Memory is a form of time travel. That's something we do during the course of the day, every single day. The idea of actually being able to physically adjust that and change it instead of being haunted by it is a really human thing.

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

As an adult, it's hard for me to remember my mother before her sickness. But if I go back into childhood, I can access that.

I don't write diaries and things like that, but I have a fantastic memory. I call that like a magic carpet. I can really concentrate and travel back in the past I don't know how many years from now and evoke that space if I wanted.

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

I believe you can remember the future as much as the past.

No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.

I stopped feeling nostalgia for the moment because I imagine myself looking back on it from the future, which really freaks me out.

All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present.