Temporal Sequence Quotes

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.

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

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

Either in or out of time, the decision of a personal agency to commit an action happens antecedent to the action itself. Even if the deciding and the acting happened simultaneously, it would still not be true that the acting was antecedent to the deciding. Imagine God saying, "Oh, look! I just created a universe. Now I'd better decide to do it.

There cannot be a cause without an effect, the present must have had its cause in the past and will have its effect in the future.

I think life is a chain of events.

The question of causality is complex. For some philosophers and physicists, time might not exist. And since cause-and-effect reasoning needs the concept of time - of one thing preceding another - the effort to establish causality is a mug's game, an infinite regression of increasingly unanswerable questions.

Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and successiveness are the soul.

It would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed at all in time; [...] Time is a thing posterior to the world. Therefore it would be correctly said that the world was not created in time, but that time had its existence in consequence of the world. For it is the motion of the heaven that has displayed the nature of time.

Instead of following one another the sounds overlap; a sound which is acoustically perceived as coming after another one can be articulated simultaneously with the latter or even in part before it.

Time goes from present to past.

Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody's present pops out of nowhere.

Every time we get a story that says there was a Big Bang, then people want to know what was before that. And if we find out, what was before that?

Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.

Of course the orders all converge backward in time, to different degrees.

God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.

The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.

If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both; but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time.

The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.