#time (18 quotes)
If you don’t have a witness, your past starts to feel fictional.
— , Exit Party Easy’s fast, and hard takes all the time.
— , The Mercy of Gods Wakefulness or enlightenment can be reasonably defined as appreciating the mystery of life in the present moment, while knowing it is the only 'thing' there is. Wakefulness’ opposite – the dissatisfaction brought about by reactive emotions and alienating desire – can be reasonably defined as the futile attempt to ‘get something out of life.’
— , Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online ‘attention economy’, of which we’ve heard so much in recent years: it’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. And you have far too little control over your attention simply to decide, as if by fiat, that you’re not going to succumb to its temptations.
— , Four Thousand Weeks The technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the ‘everything’ of which we’re trying to get on top.
— , Four Thousand Weeks If I could get enough work done, my subconscious had apparently concluded, I wouldn’t need to ask if it was all that healthy to be deriving so much of my sense of self-worth from work in the first place. And as long as I was always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead.
— , Four Thousand Weeks Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types. With luck.
— , Surface Detail Our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it. Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.
— , Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? The modus operandi of the mass media – and, even more, of new media – are of course antithetical to deliberation. If politicians are often on a high, journalists and broadcasters seem permanently to be on one. Excitement is what they crave and what they seek to project. “Breaking news” is the best kind of news – the more of it the better – and breaking news should ideally be put on air “live”. Journalists pounce on every ministerial indiscretion and on any statement made by one minister that seems to contradict what some other minister has said. Ministers who take time to make up their minds are said to be dithering, and the same is likely to be said of the few ministers who publicly acknowledge that they are having to weigh up finely balanced arguments. If a minister declines to go into a broadcasting studio, even at short notice, the presenter is apt to say icily, “We asked for an interview, but no one was available” – as though it was ministers’ duty, despite all their other duties, to be instantly available to broadcasters. The pressure is incessant, and ministers find it hard not to succumb. The media’s hyperactive tempo becomes theirs.
— , The Blunders of Our Governments It was a uniquely human problem, something no other animal had to put up with, this ability to suffer in multiple tenses – simultaneously to mourn the past, despair of the present and fear the future.
— , The Mirror World of Melody Black This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.
— , Distrust that Particular Flavor A friend said to me – we were talking about our stage in life, when we suddenly discover that we are the grown-ups, with children and parents, and even grandparents to tend to, not to mention our pupils, patients or clients or employers – that we spend so much time dealing with it all, there is scarcely time to feel.
— , Findings Perhaps, though, if we join up all these minutes we are beginning secularly to observe, we could string them together in a new kind of Sabbath, where there are no men in black blighting our lives with their notions of sin, no chaining up the children’s swings for the Lord’s day. I mean a contemplative time, a time reserved to reflect. Perhaps we would feel less imperilled.
— , Findings I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.
— , The Ocean at the End of the Lane One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes.
— , Mountains of the Mind The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely… more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.
— , Book Expo America Luncheon Talk Time is the most perishable good in the world, and it is not replenishable. You can’t earn an extra hour to use on a busy day. Nonetheless, we usually have a vague feeling that there is plenty of…
— , Meetings Are a Matter of Precious Time If you’ve got a list of 20 things you should be doing, pick the most important one or two and then just let go of the rest. You will never upload your music to every one of these sites. You will never contact every person. You will never enter every contest. Just take the one or two things that would make the biggest difference in your career, do those one or two, then stop. Turn your attention to the next one or two most important.
— , Derek Sivers Interviews → Tim Ferriss