Time Paradox Quotes

Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.

As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future -- a terrible festival of dead leaves.

Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.

Why do we remember the past, but not the future?

Yesterday, today was tomorrow. And tomorrow, today will be yesterday.

Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

We know the past but cannot control it. We control the future but cannot know it.

'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.

Originally, the burden of proof was on physicists to prove that time travel was possible. Now the burden of proof is on physicists to prove there must be a law forbidding time travel.

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.

How serious can a movie about time-traveling robots be? You want it to be cool and fun.

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.

The river of time may fork into rivers, in which case you have a parallel reality and so then you can become a time traveler and not have to worry about causing a time paradox.

Time is a strange thing. It is a whimsical tyrant, which in every century has a different face for all that one says and does.

I was born 10 years old.

People who think about time travel stories sometimes think that going back in time would be fun because you would have all the information you needed to be much more astute than the people there, when the truth is of course you wouldn't.

It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.

When you think about it, 12:15 P.M. is actually 11:75 A.M.

Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!') In heavens name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.

In cartoons, in movies, time passes differently. There are flashbacks and flashfowards.

In Einstein's equation, time is a river. It speeds up, meanders, and slows down. The new wrinkle is that it can have whirlpools and fork into two rivers. So, if the river of time can be bent into a pretzel, create whirlpools and fork into two rivers, then time travel cannot be ruled out.

Infinity is just time on an ego trip.