Time and the Art of Living Quotes

“We are not great connoisseurs of the two twilights. We miss the dawning, exclusably enough, by sleeping through it, and are as much strangers to the shadowless welling-up of day as to the hesitant return of consciousness in our slowly waking selves. But our obliviousness to evening twilight is less understandable. Why do we almost daily ignore a spectacle (and I do not mean sunset but rather the hour, more or less, afterward) that has a thousand tonalities, that alters and extends reality, that offers, more beautifully than anything man-made, a visual metaphor or peace? To say that it catches us at busy or tired moments won't do; for in temperate latitudes it varies by hours from solstice to solstice. Instead I suspect that we shun twilight because if offers two things which, as insecurely rational beings, we would rather not appreciate: the vision of irrevocable cosmic change (indeed, change into darkness), and a sense of deep ambiguity—of objects seeming to be more, less, other than we think them to be. We are noontime and midnight people, and such devoted camp-followers of certainly that we cannot endure seeing it mocked and undermined by nature.

There is a brief period of twilight of which I am especially fond, little more than a moment, when I see what seems to be color without light, followed by another brief period of light without color. The earlier period, like a dawn of night, calls up such sights as at all other times are hidden, wistful half-formless presences neither of day nor night, that draw up with them similar presences in the mind. ”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“Because we believe that one moment is more or less like the next, we lose touch with the essential urgency of the present, the fact that each passing moment is the one moment for the practice of freedom.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“Plans made swiftly and intuitively are likely to have flaws. Plans made carefully and comprehensively are sure to.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“On this subject it is striking to note how many individuals pursue, outside of their own professions and with a kind of rebellious delight, hobbies that are no more than personalized forms of work. This suggests that one of the hidden desires of humanity, provoked by the inward clamor of unused potentialities, is the dream of work in freedom.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“Few fallacies are more dangerous or easier to fall into than that by which, having read a given book, we assume that we will continue to know its contents permanently, or having mastered a discipline in the past, we assume that we control it in the present. Philosophically speaking, "to learn" is a verb with not legitimate tense.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“In old magazines and newspapers we find a number of uncomfortably revealing things: the aged as young, the dead as living, forgotten people as celebrities, an array of our own barbarous and long-discarded fads and postures, and worst, visible only in this removed perspective, our own sickening pretensions to meaning and permanence.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“...temporal experience is neither completely recurrent (in which case it would be wholly knowable) nor completely variable (in which case it would be wholly inscrutable). In effect, it is more like a piece of complex music, a Bach fugue heard for the first time. In one sense, we are excited and surprised by the novel disposition of tones and rhythms and by the uncanny variety of the treatment. In another sense, we realize that recurring ideas and cycles are what give the work its native character, and that the variations, however stunning, have significance only in terms of their relationship to these underlying themes. Conversely, the recurrent themes are realizable in their fullest sense only through the variations upon them. The careful student of time is thus as sure that certain things will recur as he is sure that they will recur in dazzling new forms.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“If the estimated age of the cosmos were shortened to seventy-two years, a human life would take about ten seconds. But look at time the other way. Each day is a minor eternity of over 86,000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the number of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos. A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby's conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely long or infinitely short.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“To those of us who spend entire days, if not lifetimes, concentrating on a series of brief and insignificant things, the present has barely any meaning at all; we become tiny timorous things, caught in the inch of space between the “in” box and the “out” box. While we may share the common illusions about a mobile present and a free future, we spend most of our lives housecleaning the past – maintaining commitments, counterbalancing errors, living up to expectations, mopping up our own postponements. In this sense, as in others, we shuffle backward into the future, unaware of our enslavement to time or of the simple freedom of new beginnings.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“What do I mean by “locked in time”? I mean, first of all, that we characteristically view mobile phenomena in immobile terms. We see processes like love and education as established circumstances rather than as complex temporal organisms whose lives depend on regular nourishment and renewal. Conversely, we tend to accept our own fear, weakness and ignorance as chronic disabilities rather than facing them, as we should, with the awareness that they are temporary and surmountable. Like still cameras, our minds consistently convert motion into stasis. In our language about time we resort to rocklike absolutisms – creation, completion, means, end, permanence, annihilation – terms whose static and extreme implications make them poor approximations of history and experience… We have little use at all for that most subtle and suggestive of words, renewal.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong pace, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“Laughable error and profound discovery are born of the same freedom.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“The years forget our errors and forgive our sins, but they punish our inaction with living death.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“The pain of growing old lies specifically in the fact that part of us does not grow old.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“For time, which can extend and magnify you, cannot liberate you from the confines of your skin or alter nature from its enduring shape.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“We are wistful about the Golden days of the past and dream of a distant future unclouded by necessity. But I suspect that if our inner souls were asked what in life they really missed, the answer would be primal danger and stress.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“Learn your own faults and vices; but do not assume that all of them should be eradicated. Sometimes, like beasts serving a greater master, they provide necessary balance and thus deserve indulgence; sometimes they are the indivisible shadows of virtues themselves.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“Indeed, there are two times for most important statements or accusations: the expressive time, when we feel inwardly impelled to say or do them, and the impressive time, when they would be most helpful to their recipients. It is only in very mature and rightly beloved people that these two times regularly coincide.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“The reason so many promises are not kept is the same reason they are made in the first place.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“The strong are free to trust, the weak constrained to.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“Free states characteristically attempt to restrain aggressive tyrannies through rational negotiation. Aggressive tyrannies understand the essential absurdity of such negation, but nonetheless participate in it with enthusiasm, knowing that it will camouflage their intentions and win them time.

Negotiating with wronged people, one turns the subject of conversation from the correction of past wrongs to the prevention of future wrongs.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“Here lies the characteristic paradox of good and evil: for action, in terms of practical effects, is superior to inaction, and the congenitally active evil an can frequently win advantage over the sometimes inactive good. Indeed, the fundamentally stable and restful spirit of goodness is a lure to evil inspirations, an encouragement to villains who are aware that, in the moral and political chess game, they have the white pieces and the first move.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“The new is forever new, but our powers to appreciate it quickly weaken and age. The new is forever the same, but our language for understanding it changes with the shadows. The truth is forever the same, forever new.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“Intimacy is to love what concentration is to work: a simultaneous drawing together of attention and release of energy.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“Method is not (as we often think) subservient to goal but rather contains the goal within itself.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“A monstrous fallacy of time, so ingrained that it is almost automatic, is the idea that we necessarily learn more and more about important human experiences as time passes.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“We are, paradoxically, unkind to the present, ignoring the opportunity to project it into the future, forgetting it as soon as it is past. As we would injure children by spoiling them, we injure time by being too attentive to its ephemera.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

“We go to sleep, and time speeds by us like starlight, whisking us hours closer to the grave. Yet sleep rejuvenates; these lost hours slow down aging and keep us young; time running fast means that Time will run slow.”
― Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living