Time Since Epoch Quotes & Sayings

Almost all genius up to now was one-sided - the result of a sickly constitution. One type had too much sense of the external, the other too much inner sense. Seldom could nature achieve a balance between the two - a complete constitution of genius. Often a perfect proportion arose by chance, but this could never endure because it was not comprehended and fixed by the spirit - they remained fortunate moments. The first genius that penetrated itself found here the exemplary germ of an immeasurable world. It made a discovery which must have been the most remarkable in the history of the world - for with it there begins a whole new epoch for humanity - and true history of all kinds becomes possible for the first time at this stage - for the way that had been traversed hitherto now makes up a proper whole that can be entirely elucidated. That point outside the world is given, and now Archimedes can fulfill his promise. — Novalis

David Levithan lives in the best of times and the worst of times, the age of wisdom and the age of foolishness, the epoch of belief and the epoch of incredulity, the season of Light, and the season of Darkness. He has endeavored in this Ghostly little book to raise the Ghost of an Idea which shall not put his readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with him. Whether he shall turn out to the be hero of his own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, time must show. — David Levithan

From time to time
I once wondered how one wanders from time to time
And think up the paradox line
Speak of Epoch's crime
Oh I lied, it hasn't happened yet
But bet you better believe it's such a habit that
I just said that in a past mindset — Criss Jami

Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time. — Richard Huelsenbeck

We must understand the motives and forces of our time and analyze their structure from three points of view: the material, the functional, and the spiritual. We must make clear in what respects our epoch differs from others and in what respects it is similar. — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense. — Milan Kundera

The distance we set between ourselves and the events of our past life, which reduces their scale, the backlog of things we failed to notice at the time, the logic which connects them, which back then was invisible, the light shed on them by the epoch they belong to, which mankind already considers a moribund piece of history, their ultimate strangeness, which makes us look back on the person we were as though they were a different being, all these things conspire to turn our past into a dream. — Catherine Millet

It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Every style seems completely appropriate to its epoch. We cannot imagine Madame de Pompadour, or the Empress Josephine, or the early Victorian lady in anything but the clothes she actually wore. Each represents completely the ideals of her time: elegant artificiality or post-Revolutionary morals, or the prudery of the rising middle class. — James Laver

Here and there, in some older houses, old faded daguerreotypes still hang on the walls ... They seem to us to be very simple ... compared with the artistic and skillful portraits made in later days ... Here was a photograph that at one time had been the last word, a very modern portrait ... Today it is just a part of cultural history. The small yellowed surface has acquired depth, an admonishing perspective. We hold in our hand a symbol of the structure and ideology of an epoch. — Isak Dinesen

I shall be told, perhaps, that Alyosha was stupid, undeveloped, had not finished his studies, and so on. That he did not finish his studies is true, but to say that he was stupid or dull would be a great injustice. I'll simply repeat what I have said above. He entered upon this path only because, at that time, it alone struck his imagination and presented itself to him as offering an ideal means of escape for his soul from darkness to light. Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our last epoch- that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. Though — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang. — Carl Sagan

It is noteworthy that at a time when every religious sanction of authority has vanished, we live in a very authoritarian epoch. — Nikolai A. Berdyaev

Thus, from the first divine contract, and the pure region where truth abides, a continuous chain of mercies and light extends to humanity, through every epoch, and will be prolonged to the end of time, until it returns to the abode from which it descends, taking with it all the peaceful souls it shall have collected in its course; that we may know that it was Love which opened, directed and closed the circle of all things. — Louis Claude De Saint-Martin

Innumerable conditions must be exquisitely optimized for the support of humanity and of civilization. Many of them are highly time variable. Evidence showing that a wide variety of independent conditions all reached optimality during the identical narrow epoch when human beings appeared on the cosmic and terrestrial scene testifies of supernatural design and purpose rather than mere coincidence. — Hugh Ross

Modernity is the ensemble of changes - intellectual, political, economic, social, cultural, technological, aesthetic - that have altered the world drastically since roughly the 17th century, until which time the world was, in the above respects, far less different from the world of any previous epoch of recorded history than it is from the world of today. The modern predicament is the set of problems these changes have bequeathed us. — George Scialabba

She sighed and said, "Why not us? Who knows whether you were given this opportunity for such a time as this?"

-Evelyn Coble, Epoch Dawning — C.H.E. Sadaphal

As the journalists of the time phased it, this was the epoch of the Leap into the Air. The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a mania; everyone of means was frantic to possess a thing so controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and danger of the road, and in France in the year 1943 thirty thousand of these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared humming softly into the sky. — H.G.Wells

Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as much shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames; objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterwards, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: 'Cogito ergo sum'. For him that had not been true; his truth had been, 'Senito ergo sum'. I feel so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than non-life. — Brian W. Aldiss

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas. — Karl Marx

A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If you like, you could call this the psychology of total equivalence, let's say neuronics for short, and dismiss it as biological fantasy. However, I am convinced as we move back through geophysical time, so we reenter the amnionic corridor, and move back through spinal and archeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct ecological terrain, its own flora and fauna, as recognizable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine. Except that this is no scenic railway, but a total reorientation of the personality. If we let these buried phantoms master us as we reappear, we'll be swept back helplessly in the floodtide like pieces of flotsam. — J.G. Ballard

A historic transition is occurring, barely noticed. Slowly, quietly, imperceptibly, religion is shriveling in America, as it has done in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and other advanced societies. Supernatural faith increasingly belongs to the Third World. The First World is entering the long-predicted Secular Age, when science and knowledge dominate. The change promises to be another shift of civilization, like past departures of the era of kings, the time of slavery, the Agricultural Age, the epoch of colonialism, and the like. Such cultural transformations are partly invisible to contemporary people, but become obvious in retrospect. — James A. Haught

Our epoch is a time of tragic collision between matter and spirit and of the downfall of the purely material world view. — Wassily Kandinsky

Black holes may be apertures to elsewhen. Were we to plunge down a black hole, we would re-emerge, it is conjectured, in a different part of the universe and in another epoch in time . . . Black holes may be entrances to Wonderlands. But are there Alices or white rabbits? — Carl Sagan

For not only is an odd man "not always" a particular and isolated case, but, on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is precisely he, perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We are at a major epoch in human history, which is that we don't need sex to recreate the race. You can have babies without sex. This is the first time in human history that has been true, and it means, for example, we could do some extraordinary things. — David Cronenberg

The first impression of the writings of Mr. J. J. Rousseau received by a knowledgeable reader, who is reading for something more than vanity or to kill time, is that he is encountering a lucidity of mind, a noble impulse of genius and a sensitive soul of such a high level that perhaps never an author of whatever epoch or of whatever people has been able to possess in combination.
The impression that immediately follows is bewilderment over the strange and contradictory opinions, which so oppose those which are in general circulation that one can easily come to the suspicion that the author, by virtue of his extraordinary talent, wishes to show off only the force of his bewitching wit and through the magic of rhetoric make himself something apart who through captivating novelties stands out among all rivals at wit. — Immanuel Kant

We live in a time of global transformation. The power on Earth no longer lies with the forces of imperialistic globalisation, but with those groups who are now connecting with the forces of transformation. It is not terror and violence, but trust and solidarity which will lead the new world. This is not just a wishful dream, but the objective reality of the coming epoch. — Dieter Duhm

All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay. — Immanuel Kant

History is an amazing presence
it is the place where vanished time gathers. While we are in the flow of time, it is difficult to glean its significance, and it is only in looking back that we can recognize the hidden dimensions at work within a particular era or epoch. — John O'Donohue

All pursuit of commodity production becomes at the same time pursuit of the exploitation of labour-power; but only capitalist commodity production is an epoch-making mode of exploitation, which in the course of its historical development revolutionizes the entire economic structure of society by its organization of the labour process and its gigantic extension of technique, and towers incomparably above all earlier epochs. — Karl Marx