
“your life can change in an instant. that instant can last forever.”
Source: The Life Before Her Eyes
Section 60
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)
Context: One wonders whether a generation that demands instant satisfaction of all its needs and instant solution of the world's problems will produce anything of lasting value. Such a generation, even when equipped with the most modern technology, will be essentially primitive — it will stand in awe of nature, and submit to the tutelage of medicine men.
“your life can change in an instant. that instant can last forever.”
Source: The Life Before Her Eyes
“Longing and desire goes further than instant satisfaction. That's human nature.”
via Nika, Colleen. "Exclusive: Anna Sui Discusses Her Spring 2012 Show and Punk Rock Heritage". Rolling Stone (September 14, 2011). http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/exclusive-anna-sui-discusses-her-spring-2012-show-and-punk-rock-heritage-20110914
Source: Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search (1975), p. 120.
“God is no more intimidated by childish demands for instant gratification than are wise parents.”
Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)
“You don't need to travel, laughter is an instant vacation”
Variant: Laughter is an instant vacation.
“No one could say how long that life would last. Whatever has form can disappear in an instant.”
Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun
“Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces”
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1902)
Context: Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes. The human mind offers, in the perfection which it has been able to give to astronomy, a feeble idea of this intelligence. Its discoveries in mechanics and geometry, added to that of universal gravity, have enabled it to comprehend in the same analytical expressions the past and future states of the system of the world.<!--p.4