Temporality Quotes

We're all just passing time and occupy our chair very briefly.

Be not as one that hath ten thousand years to live; death is nigh at hand: while thou livest, while thou hast time, be good.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.

He sometimes felt that life was something that had already risen, and all of this, the Jackson Pollack of spring, summer, and fall, the vague refrigeration and tinfoiled sky of wintertime, was just a falling, really, originward, in a kind of correction, as if by spritual gravity, towards the wiser consciousness--or consciousnessless, maybe; could gravity trick itself like that?--of death. It was a kind of movement both very slow and very fast; there was both too much and not enough time to think.

Death is the end of the fear of death. [...] To avoid it we must not stop fearing it and so life is fear. Death is time because time allows us to move toward death which we fear at all times when alive. We move around and that is fear. Movement through space requires time. Without death there is no movement through space and no life and no fear. To be aware of death is to be alive is to fear is to move around in space and time toward death.

Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.

Even nothing cannot last forever.

Everything transitory is but an image.

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.

It's all fleeting. As fame is fleeting, so are all the trappings of fame fleeting. The money, the clothes, the furniture.

Time is a lot of the things people say that God is. There's always preexisting, and having no end. There's the notion of being all powerful-because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains, not armies. And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust; and unto dust thou shalt return. And if time is anything akin to God, I suppose that memory must be the devil.

Time is just memory Mixed in with Desire.

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.

Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?

Life is only precious because it ends, kid.

Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause - that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take the stance - backward.

Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.

I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.

Think about how rare it is that you exist at all. Also think about time this way: If something exists, even for a second, then forever in the future that thing “existed”, and forever in the past that thing “was going to exist”. So to even be conscious for a millisecond is a kind of immortality, but you have more than a millisecond. You have minutes. Hours. Months. A year? Years! This is a gift.

Dance is like life. It exists as you are flitting through it, and when it's over, it's done.

The concept of time shuts off eternity.

Some men spend their whole life furnishing for themselves the things proper to life without realizing that at our birth each of us was poured a mortal brew to drink.

The task I've been given seems absurd: To wait here on earth until I no longer exist.