Temporality Quotes

• A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

  Vaclav Havel

  Spring, Greatness, Important

  "Disturbing the Peace". Book by Vaclav Havel, 1986.

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• That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

  John Updike

  Marriage, Real, Heaven

  John Updike (2011). “Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism”, p.467, Random House

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• And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Running, Despair, Noise

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• Destroy your primitivity, and you will most probably get along well in the world, maybe achieve great success--but Eternity will reject you. Follow up your primitivity, and you will be shipwrecked in temporality, but accepted by Eternity.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Rejects You, World, Eternity

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• Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.

  Martin Heidegger

  Process

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• ...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

  Roland Barthes

  Reading, Simple, Looks

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• Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time: and not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections, not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.

  Meister Eckhart

  Time, Light, Smell

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• The past is a trail you leave behind, much like the wake of a speedboat.  That is, it's a vanishing trail temporarily showing you where you were.  The wake of a boat doesn't affect it's course-obviously it can't since it appears behind the boat.  So consider this image when you exclaim that your past is the reason you aren't moving forward.

  Wayne Dyer

  Inspirational, Moving On, Moving Forward

  FaceBook post by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer from Jan 16, 2012

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  Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

  John Steinbeck

  Roots, America, Usa

  Attributed in "A Short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright, Toronto: Anansi Press, (pp. 124), 2004.

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• 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.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Life, Philosophy, Thinking

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• If we can keep at least a bit of the mind clear about temporality, we can mange complicated, even difficult, times with grace.

  Sylvia Boorstein

  Grace, Mind, Difficult Times

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• Sometimes you have to put your own dreams on hold temporarily so you can help release a dream in somebody else. What you make happen for others, God will make happen for you.

  Joel Osteen

  Inspirational, God, Christian

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• A lot of my songs are about death and the fleetingness of life. It just feels good to remind myself about that a lot. For whatever reason. And it's a beautiful thing, actually. It seems to me like it's a beautiful way to live in the world and to relate to things, with an awareness of temporality.

  Phil Elvrum

  Beautiful, Song, Feel Good

  Interview with Brandon Stosuy, believermag.com. July 1, 2009.

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• Let me define a garden as the meeting of raw nature and the human imagination in which both seek the fulfillment of their beauty. Every sign indicates that nature wants us and wishes for collaboration with us, just as we long for nature to be fulfilled in us. If our original state was to live in a garden, as Adam and Eve did, then a garden signals our absolute origins as well as our condition of eternity, while life outside the garden is time and temporality.

  Thomas Moore

  Beauty, Time, Garden

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• But eternity is not temporality at a standstill. What is oppressive about the concept of the eternal is the justification, incomprehensible to us, that time must undergo in eternity and the logical conclusion of that, the justification of ourselves as we are.

  Franz Kafka

  Time, Eternity, Logical

  Franz Kafka (1991). “The Blue Octavo Notebooks”

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• Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.

  Terence McKenna

  Thinking, May, Psychedelic

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• The camera has a mind of its own--its own point of view. Then the human bearer of time stumbles into the camera's gaze--the camera's domain of pristine space hitherto untraversed is now contaminated by human temporality. Intrusion occurs, but the camera remains transfixed by its object. It doesn't care. The camera has no human fears.

  Frank Lentricchia

  Views, Space, Mind

  Frank Lentricchia (2011). “The Sadness of Antonioni”, p.124, SUNY Press

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• Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it's also one on temporality too. Statistics - even when accurate - are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future.

  Will Self

  Past, Individuality, Statistics

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• Youth no longer inhabit the privileged space, however compromised, that was offered to previous generations. They now occupy a neoliberal notion of temporality of dead time, zones of abandonment and terminal exclusion marked by a loss of faith in progress and a belief in those apocalyptic narratives in which the future appears indeterminate, bleak and insecure.

  Henry Giroux

  Loss, Insecure, Time Zones

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I think the approach to Islam as a tradition is helpful. Tradition helps us to focus on questions about authority and temporality, and about the language used in relation to the two.

  Talal Asad

  Thinking, Two, Focus

  "Do Muslims Belong in the West? An Interview with Talal Asad". Interview with Hasan Azad, www.jadaliyya.com. February 3, 2015.

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• Ideally, nothing should be embraced by a consumer firmly, nothing should command a commitment till death do us part, no needs should be seen as fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate. There ought to be a proviso 'until further notice' attached to any oath of loyalty and any commitment. It is but the volatility, the in-built temporality of all engagements that truly counts; it counts more than the commitment itself, which is anyway not allowed to outlast the time necessary for consuming the object of desire (or, rather, the time sufficient for the desirability of that object to wane).

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Loyalty, Commitment, Desire

  Zygmunt Bauman (2013). “Globalization: The Human Consequences”, p.56, John Wiley & Sons

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• We cannot fulfill our engagements with the Almighty without we have that Spirit with us. We should so live as to acknowledge the Good Spirit continually. We cannot do this unless we let the Spirit of God rule in temporalities as well as in spiritual matter.

  Daniel H. Wells

  Spiritual, Engagement, Matter

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