Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

It cannot be objected that there has not been time sufficient for any amount of organic change; for the lapse of time has been so great as to be utterly inappreciable by the human intellect.

Mary, since she doesn't know what time it is when she arrives, says, "I hereby dub the time five minutes from now, "pow".

He must have experienced each time the sort of surprise on finding nothing, which is calculated to lead in time to the adoption of Berkeley's theory that objects of sense are only in the mind.

We do not make due allowance for the enormous intervals of time, which have probably elapsed between our consecutive formations,—longer perhaps in some cases than the time required for the accumulation of each formation.

It is by no means always reliable; almost everybody has at some time experienced the well-known illusion that all that is happening now happened before at some time. There are occasions when familiarity does not attach itself to any definite object, when there is merely a vague feeling that SOMETHING is familiar.

It is not a priori that the world becomes more and more disorganised with time. It is a matter of experience that disorganisation comes at a later rather than an earlier time. It is imaginable, for example, that by stirring nuts and raisins in a tank of chocolate they become unshuffled.

And this I say not by way of boasting, but because it is useful to say it. If there be any that despond, let them look at me, that being of all men of my time the most busied in affairs of state, and a man of health not very strong (whereby much time is lost), and in this course altogether a pioneer, following in no man's track nor sharing these counsels with anyone, have nevertheless by resolutely entering on the true road, and submitting my mind to Things, advanced these matters, as I suppose, some little way. And then let them consider what may be expected (after the way has been thus indicated) from men abounding in leisure, and from association of labors, and from successions of ages — the rather because it is not a way over which only one man can pass at a time (as is the case with that of reasoning), but one in which the labors and industries of men (especially as regards the collecting of experience) may with the best effect be first distributed and then combined.

The idea which underlies this sort of method is that every time what is sought is the motive. People at one time thought it useful to kill a man, sacrifice him to the god of fertility, in order to produce good crops.

In fact, it can be argued that the somewhat similar but not formally related concept of real-time deterministic automation is far more “natural” in terms of time and space conditions on computation.

To verify "The concert lasted an hour" you must tell how you measured time. It is a misunderstanding about both time and length that they are independent of measurement.