Quotes about instant
page 3

“Poetry, finally, is the form of art where not only are the unities of time, place, and action freed from the restrictive bounds of the single instant, the single spot, the single simple transaction, but the medium of embodiment is thought itself, with its completely articulate utterance in language. Here the very source of the ideal view of the world, the very origin of the creative artistic impulse, becomes the material and the instrument of its own purpose, the executor of its own will. The scope of the creative faculty is therefore the utmost conceivable, and poetry rightfully takes the highest place as the art of the greatest possibilities — the art, indeed, of an all-inclusive compass, as at length completely self-supplying and self-directing.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.210

World, Art, Time

“He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 148, referring to Aureliano José

Death, War, Way, Suffering

“For the attention of the poet-chronicler is fixed on the invisible shackles of selfhood that bind us all. He seems to be describing great events; in reality he does not for one instant forget that he is occupied with the history of souls, depicting the incidence of their experience and knowledge on the external world.”

Sister Nivedita book The Web of Indian Life

[The Web of Indian Life, Ch. VII: The Indian Sagas, http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/wil/wil09.htm, 20 June 2012, Sister Nivedita]
The Web of Indian Life (1904)

World, Soul, History, Knowledge

“No one is “born gay.” The idea is ridiculous, but it is symptomatic of our overpoliticized climate that such assertions are given instant credence by gay activists and their media partisans. I think what gay men are remembering is that they were born different.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 71

Men, Idea, Thinking

“I shoot only on film and plate. I don’t touch digital. There are many reasons: mentally it’s very different to work with film. It’s expensive, it’s heavy, so you have to prepare. It’s precious and every photograph you have to say yes! It’s now! There's no fiddling about and fixing it later. I really believe the soul of photography is its relationship with the instant.”

Hélène Binet (1959) Swiss photographer

Source: Ten questions for photographer Hélène Binet http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/photography/articles/2012/december/06/ten-questions-for-photographer-helene-binet/, Phaidon Press, 6 December 2012.

Soul

“So-called immobile objects exist only in movement. Immobile, certain, and permanent things, ideas, works and beliefs change, transform, and disintegrate. Immobile objects are snapshots of a movement whose existence we refuse to accept, because we ourselves are only an instant in the great movement. Movement is the only static, final, permanent, and certain thing. Static means transformation. Let us be static together with movement. Move statically! Be static! Be movement! Believe in movement's static quality. Believe in change. Do not hold onto anything. Change! Do not pinpoint anything! Everything about us is movement. Everything around us is change. Believe in movement's static quality. Be static.”

Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) Swiss painter and sculptor

reprinted in 'Zero', ed. Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press 1973, p. 119
Quotes, 1960's, untitled statements in 'Zero 3', (1961)

Idea, Change

“No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own. This is not only conspicuous in children, who implicitly embrace every opinion propos’d to them; but also in men of the greatest judgment and understanding, who find it very difficult to follow their own reason or inclination, in opposition to that of their friends and daily companions. To this principle we ought to ascribe the great uniformity we may observe in the humours and turn of thinking of those of the same nation; and ’tis much more probable, that this resemblance arises from sympathy, than from any influence of the soil and climate, which, tho’ they continue invariably the same, are not able to preserve the character of a nation the same for a century together. A good-natur’d man finds himself in an instant of the same humour with his company; and even the proudest and most surly take a tincture from their countrymen and acquaintance. A chearful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and serenity into my mind; as an angry or sorrowful one throws a sudden dump upon me. Hatred, resentment, esteem, love, courage, mirth and melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication than from my own natural temper and disposition. So remarkable a phaenomenon merits our attention, and must be trac’d up to its first principles.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 1, Section 11
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 2: Of the passions

Love, Men, Children, Feeling

“During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, TV, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each part of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts. Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale…”

David Bohm (1917–1992) American theoretical physicist

"On Dialogue"

World, Travel, Feeling, Communication

“Poincaré's mind was not subject to hysteresis or hibernation. He had the unique faculty of dismissing an idea from his mind, the instant the stimulus was gone, and to supplant it immediately with another creative idea.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954), Ch. 1. The Iconoclast

Idea

“Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“The Bed”.
Flying to America: 45 More Stories (2007)

Season

“To laugh, if but for an instant only, has never been granted to man before the fortieth day from his birth, and then it is looked upon as a miracle of precocity.”

Pliny the Elder book Natural History

Book VII, sec. 2.
Naturalis Historia

Birth

“The unsuspecting fish, who knew nothing but a life in the river, went about its routine like any other day, but in an instant was ripped out of its reality to meet with death. Like that fish, we routinely live our lives hardly aware that, at the least expected moment, the yellow-eyed hawk of fate in the form of crises, tragedy or even death, may wrench us out of our comfortable environment. We regularly hear of it in the news or see it around us but rarely take seriously that it could happen to us. Perhaps the lesson here is to guard against complacency and give a higher priority to our spiritual needs. If the fish swam deeper, the hawk would not be able to reach it. Similarly, if we go deeper into our connection to God, we will find an inner reality so deep and satisfying that it lifts the consciousness to a place where we could deal with the effects of unforeseeable fate with a stable, detached mind.”

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

?
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Life, Death, God, Fate

“If a friend in Texas seals a silver coin in one envelope and a gold coin in another and mails the envelopes to Tokyo and London, the instant you open you envelope in Japan you know the contents of my envelope in England. But opening your letter causes no physical change in England (faster-than-light or otherwise) but merely involves a change in your knowledge concerning something happening far away and outside your control.”

Nick Herbert (1936) American physicist

Source: Quantum Reality - Beyond The New Physics, Chapter 9, Four Quantum Realities, p. 171 ( See also: Principle of locality)

Knowledge, Light, Change

“No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space. However brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light.”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

Letter to Fr. Pastells (4 April 1893)

God, Intelligence, Idea, Light

“But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbéd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."”

Francis Thompson The Hound of Heaven

St. 1.
The Hound of Heaven (1893)

Speed

“Over the years I have met people who have made a very human claim on me by making known their need to be loved. For a long time my response was instant and reflexive, born of the "oughts" I had absorbed: "Of course you need to be loved. Everyone does. And I love you."
It took me a long time to understand that although everyone needs to be loved, I cannot be the source of that gift for everyone who asks me for it. There are some relationships in which I am capable of love and otters in which I am not. To pretend otherwise, to put out promissory notes I am unable to honor, is to damage my own integrity and that of the person in need, all in the name of love.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), pp. 47-48

Love, People, Understanding, Time

“In 1763 a Croatian Jesuit named Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711 - 1787) identified the ultimate implication of this mechanical atomic theory. One of the crucial aspects of Isaac Newton's laws of motion is their predictive capability. If we know how an object is moving at any instant - how fast, and in which direction - and if, furthermore, we know the forces acting on it, we can calculate its future trajectory exactly. This predictability made it possible for astronomers to use Newton's laws of motion and gravity to calculate, for example, when future solar eclipses would happen.
Boscovich realized that if all the world is just atoms in motion and collision, then an all-seeing mind "could, from a continuous arc described in an interval of time, no matter how small, by all points of matter, derive the law [that is, a universal map] of forces itself … Now, if the law of forces were known, and the position, velocity and direction of all the points at any given instant, it would be possible for a mind of this type to foresee all the necessary subsequent motions and states, and to predict all the phenomena that necessarily followed from them."”

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) Croat-Italian physicist

Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (2006).

World, Law, Universe, Time

“How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field… Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.”

Tom Stoppard Jumpers

George, Act I
Jumpers (1972)

Wisdom, Hell

“I'm a man who falls in love so easily, and with such a reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Love, Marriage

“Barely a hundred and fifty years had passed since Galileo's experiment at Pisa had ushered in the new order of things; a mere instant as compared with the previous life of the race. Yet, this brief span had witnessed a complete shift in the outlook of the intellectual leaders of humanity: from blind adherence to authority and dogma towards a healthy habit of facing facts and an enlightened faith in the efficacy of reason. Few doubted that this buoyancy and self-reliance of the leaders would eventually reach the masses, thus causing a profound metamorphosis in the attitude of the common man towards his own life and the destinies of his race.
…Led by thinkers, and under the banners of liberty, happiness, and truth, humanity was to emerge into a Golden Age, free from oppression and strife. Alas! The French Revolution… resembled more a convention of inquisitors and hangmen than it did an assembly of enlightened emancipators. …After twenty years of adventure, the humanitarian aspirations bequeathed by the Encyclopedists, tattered and trampled first by a bloody republic, then by a still bloodier empire, were finally declared dead by the Holy Alliance.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954), Ch. 2. The Age of Innocence

Life, Happiness, Truth, Age

“They say it only takes an instant to have a dream; a dream can be compressed into hardtack.”

Gao Xingjian (1940) Chinese novelist and playwright

Source: Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (2005), p. 110, from "buying a fishing rod for my grandfather"

Dreams

“Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"A View from the Patriotic Left" http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=F01E41CB-A584-4597-B9BE-86BBD9B3F7A1, Boston Globe (2002-09-09)]: On the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan <br class="br">2000s, 2002

Fight

“In the eternal dream, eternity is the same as an instant. Maybe I will come back in an instant.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

En el sueño eterno, la eternidad es lo mismo que un instante. Quizá yo vuelva dentro de un instante.
Voces (1943)

Dreams

“The basic value of any proposition is its commercial aspect, and naturally the first query of inventor, capitalist and layman is : "What conditions exist that will make a market for automobiles or create a desire in the public mind for their use?" Some will say progression, the spirit of which surrounds us everywhere; others say, expediency and the desire for saving- minutes and even seconds; others, again, their convenience and readiness for instant use; all of which are true but do not in a broad sense answer the question, but create another as to what has made all these things desirable on the part of the public as things necessary to its comfort and welfare.”

Clinton Edgar Woods (1863) American engineer

Source: The Electric Automobile (1900), p. 1, First paragraph of first chapter entitled "General conditions surrounding the introduction and use of automobiles"

Question, Nature, Sense, Parting

“These doubts must be met in the following way. You announce that meaning does not exist until you make it, and then you don the mantle of meaning-maker. The minute you do this, all previous belief systems, both those that told you what to believe and those that told you that there was nothing to believe, vanish. You suddenly enact the paradigm shift that I believe we are now ready to embrace: the shift from seeking meaning to making meaning.
You let go of wondering what the universe wants of you, … and you announce that you will make life mean exactly what you intend it to mean. This is an amazing, glorious, and triumphant announcement. The instant you realize that meaning is not provided (as traditional belief systems teach) and that it is not absent (as nihilists feel), a new world of potential opens up for you.”

Eric Maisel (1947) American writer

Source: The Atheist’s Way (2009), p. 54

Life, World, Way, Feeling

“You aren’t really jumping through time, that’s the illusion; what you’re actually doing is leaving one timestream and jumping to—maybe even creating—another. The second one is identical to the one you just left, including all of the changes you made in it—up to the instant of your appearance. At that moment, simply by the fact of your existence in it, the second timestream becomes a different timestream. You are the difference.”

David Gerrold book The Man Who Folded Himself

Source: The Man Who Folded Himself (1973), p. 48

Appearance, Change, Time

“When we have but the will to do it, that very moment will Justice be done: that very instant the tyrants of the Earth shall bite the dust.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

An Appeal to the Young (1880)

Justice

“Minkowski… supposed that this fourth dimension of time was not detached from and independent of the three dimensions of space. He introduced a new four-dimensional space to which ordinary space contributed three dimensions, and time one; we may call it 'space-time'…. The succession of positions which a particle occupied in ordinary space at a succession of instants of time would be represented by a line in space-time; this he called the 'world-line' of the particle…. Newton's absolute space and absolute time fell out of science, and they carried much with them in their fall. First to go was the concept of simultaneity…. It now became necessary to find a way of treating gravitation which should not involve simultaneity. Einstein found through the medium of his 'Principle of Equivalence'.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

The Growth of Physical Science (1947)

World, Way, Science, Time

“At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1970s, Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder (1976)

Light, Speed

“A spider lowered itself, fathom by fathom, on a perilous length of thread and was suddenly transfixed in the path of a sunbeam and, for an instant, was a thing of radiant gold.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 4, section 1 (p. 408)

“It was a queer, disturbing instant of recognition. We all create monsters in our minds. The only important difference may be which of us let our monsters become real.”

David Brin book Earth

Part III (pp. 145-146)
Earth (1990)

“There is only the constant knowledge and enjoyment of the Heart, moment to moment, through the instant of all conditions of appearance and disappearance. Of this I am perfectly certain. I am That.”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

Page 23, 2004 Standard Edition.
The Knee of Listening

Knowledge, Appearance, Heart

“And as for those who voted for me, I know there will be many whose pencils hovered for an instant before putting an X in my box and I will work flat out to repay and to justify your confidence.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

Source: 2000s, 2008, First Speech As London Mayor (May 3, 2008)

Confidence, Box

“A manifesto is a communication made to the whole world, whose only pretensions is to the discovery of an instant cure for political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, agronomical and literary syphilis. It may be pleasant, and good-natured, it's always right, it's strong, vigorous and logical.
Apropos of logic, I consider myself very likeable.”

Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist

1920s
Source: 'Dada Manifesto On Feeble Love And Bitter Love', Intro of part II, by Tristan Tzara, 12th December 1920

World, Communication, Nature, Strong

“The time comes in the life of each of us when we realize that death awaits us as it awaits others, that we will receive at the end neither preference nor exemption. It is then, in that disturbed moment, that we know life is an adventure with an ending, not a succession of bright days that go on forever. Sometimes the knowledge come with the repudiation and quick revolt that such injustice awaits us, sometimes with fear that dries the mouth and closes the eyes for an instant, sometimes with servile weariness, an acquiescence more dreadful than fear. The knowledge that my own end was near came with pain, and afterwards astonishment, with the conventional heart attack, from which, I've been told, I've made an excellent recovery.”

William March (1893–1954) United States Marine, novelist, short story writer

Entitled "Poor Pilgrim, Poor Stranger", Found in the typewriter the morning of his death.

Life, Death, Pain, Fear

“To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Vol. V, par. 254
Collected Papers (1931-1958)

Way, Time

“Man, no doubt, owes many other moral duties to his fellow men; such as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, protect the defenceless, assist the weak, and enlighten the ignorant. But these are simply moral duties, of which each man must be his own judge, in each particular case, as to whether, and how, and how far, he can, or will, perform them. But of his legal duty—that is, of his duty to live honestly towards his fellow men—his fellow men not only may judge, but, for their own protection, must judge. And, if need be, they may rightfully compel him to perform it. They may do this, acting singly, or in concert. They may do it on the instant, as the necessity arises, or deliberately and systematically, if they prefer to do so, and the exigency will admit of it.”

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) Anarchist, Entrepreneur, Abolitionist

Section II, p. 6
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter I. The Science of Justice.

Men, Clothes

“He called out for the others, but they were nowhere near. He tried to run, without knowing which way to go, but his legs were sluggish and the earth stood on end; in the next instant he found himself lying horizontal, his cheek in the dirt, without having felt himself fall. Then the earth tilted away from him again. He tried to walk steadily, but the earth continued to surge. Finally he sat down beneath a house-gable, leaned his back against the wall, and waited until the earth settled back in its place. He drooped his head and mumbled about his forefathers... In the end all he could do was start to sing the sad passion-hymns and death-prayers his mother had taught him in his youth.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part II: The Fair Maiden

Death, Youth, Sadness, Way

“In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

Life, Happiness, Question, Change

“A lot of the times with porn, it's instant fame. The only thing I can compare it to is being a child actor. You get it fast, then there's a shelf-life for it. With mainstream films, you've got to go to acting classes, you've really got to hustle, there's so much competition, but with these [porn] guys, if you're good-looking with a great body, you're in like Flynn.”

John Roecker (1966) American film director

[The Bay Area Reporter, Erotic superstars, up-close & personal: here!TV's 'Everything You Wanted to Know About Gay Porn Stars', December 4, 2008, David, Lamble, Benro Enterprises, Inc.]

Life, Guy, Time

“Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 106

Problem

“You are never to lose sight of nature; the instant you do, you are all abroad, at the mercy of every gust of fashion, without knowing or seeing the point to which you ought to steer.”

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) English painter, specialising in portraits

Discourse no. 12, delivered on December 10, 1784; vol. 2, p. 103.
Discourses on Art

Fashion, Nature

“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" (1967)

Hate, Feeling

“The Devourers are the most accomplished merchants in all the many universes — so accomplished, indeed, that they sell only trash. There is a deep necessity in this, for the Devourers must occupy all their cunning in perfecting their methods of selling and so have not an instant to spare in considering the worth of what they sell.”

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction

Short Fiction, Bazaar of the Bizarre (1963)

Universe, Perfection

“From far, far in the distant past,
Down to this day, this very instant,
Those things we have longed for most
Have not been attained, and we sorrow.”

Ippen (1239–1289) Japanese Buddhist monk, founder of the Jishu school.

"Hymn of Amida's Vow" (Chapter 1, p. 3).
No Abode: The Record of Ippen (1997)

Distant, Past

“Sin is man’s destruction. Only the rust of sin can consume the soul-or eternally destroy it. For here indeed is the remarkable thing from which already that simple wise man of olden time derived a proof of the immortality of the soul, that the sickness of the soul (sin) is not like bodily sickness which kills the body. Sin is not a passage-way which a man has to pass through once, for from it one shall flee; sin is not (like suffering) the instant, but an eternal fall from the eternal, hence it is not ‘once’, and it cannot possibly be that its ‘once’ is no time. No, just as between the rich man in hell and Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom there was a yawning gulf fixed, so is there also a yawning distinction between suffering and sin. Let us not confuse it, lest talk about suffering might become less frank-hearted, because it had also sin in mind, and this less frank-hearted talk might be boldly impudent inasmuch as it is talking this way about sin. This precisely is the Christian position, that there is this infinite distinction between evil and evil, as they are confusedly named; this precisely is the Christian characteristic, to talk of temporal sufferings ever more and more frank-heartedly, more triumphantly, more joyfully, because Christianity regarded, sin, and sin only, is destructive.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Christian Discourses

Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, The Joy of it – That We Suffer Only Once But Triumph Eternally. P. 108 Lowrie Translation 1961 Oxford University Press
1840s, Christian Discourses (1848)

Way, Soul, Hell, Suffering

“What could we call the moment before we begin to eat the honey? Some would call it anticipation, but we think it's more than that. We would call it awareness. It's when we become happy and realize it, if only for an instant. By Enjoying the Process, we can stretch that awareness out so that it's no longer a moment, but covers the whole thing. Then we can have a lot of fun. Just like Pooh.”

Benjamin Hoff book The Tao of Pooh

Bisy Backson.
The Tao of Pooh (1982)

Happiness, Thinking

“I have sought to determine… the different relations of bulk, subsisting between the various parts of his frame; and to ascertain how far these relations become modified during his development, what they are in the flower of his age, and in what position they remain up to the instant of decay.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Preface of M. Quetelet
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)

Age, Flowers, Parting

“As a Line, I say, is looked upon to be the Trace of a Point moving forward, being in some sort divisible by a Point, and may be divided by Motion one Way, viz. as to Length; so Time may be conceiv'd as the Trace of a Moment continually flowing, having some Kind of Divisibility from an Instant, and from a successive Flux, inasmuch as it can be divided some how or other. And like as the Quantity of a Line consists of but one Length following the Motion; so the Quantity of Time pursues but one Succession stretched out as it were in Length, which the Length of the Space moved over shews and determines. We therefore shall always express Time by a right Line; first, indeed, taken or laid down at Pleasure, but whose Parts will exactly answer to the proportionable Parts of Time, as its Points do to the respective Instants of Time, and will aptly serve to represent them. Thus much for Time.”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

p, 125
Geometrical Lectures (1735)

Pleasure, Way, Time, Success

“For an instant a half-formed prayer struggled into Havor’s mouth. But he could not utter it. Not for himself. For him those words were already drowned by the noise the thong-whip had made, or the sounds of children crying out of hunger or the cold or sheer misery in that grey house of orphans in the far North, eight years ago.”

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) British writer

Source: Short fiction, Companions on the Road (1975), Chapter 7, “The Snow-Waste” (p. 69)

Hunger, Children, Housing, Cry

“The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is the faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous; the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: after 1970, posthumous, Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics', 1990, p. 168

Faith, Fashion

“In that instant when I had seen the blazing star that was the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the very eye of that splendor, strange vistas of being; as though in the depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 166)

Star, Past, Future

“It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist

Pictures of the Gone World http://www.litkicks.com/Texts/GoneWorld8.html

“Now, in the unhindered and unobstructed dharma-opening of the dharma-realm there is no dharma, and yet no non-dharma; no opening, and yet no non-opening. Thus it is neither large nor small, neither in a hurry nor taking its time; neither moving nor still, neither one nor many. Since it its not large, it can become an atom, leaving nothing behind. Since it is not small, it can contain all of space with room left over. Unhurried, it can include all the kalpas in the three time periods; not taking its time, it can enter fully into an instant.”

Wonhyo (617–686) Korean buddhist philosopher

晉譯華嚴經疏序 Hwaeomgyeong so seo (Preface to the Commentary on the Jin Translation of the Flower Ornament Sutra)
Translated by A. Charles Muller.

Time

“As soon as the funeral of Augustus was over, a temple and divine worship were forthwith decreed him. The Senate then turned their instant supplications to Tiberius, to fill his vacant place; but received an abstruse answer, touching the greatness of the Empire and his own distrust of himself; he said that "nothing but the divine genius of Augustus was equal to the mighty task: that for himself, who had been called by him into a participation of his cares, he had learnt by feeling them, what a daring, what a difficult toil was that of government, and how perpetually subject to the caprices of fortune: that in a State supported by so many illustrious patriots they ought not to cast the whole administration upon one; and more easy to be administered were the several offices of the Government by the united pains and sufficiency of many."”

Tiberius (-42–37 BC) 2nd Emperor of Ancient Rome, member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty

The Annals of Tacitus - Book 1

Pain, Feeling, Support

“Do not in an instant what an age cannot recompense.”

Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) English churchman and historian

Of Anger.
The Holy State and the Profane State (1642)

Age

“The Vedanta teaches that Nirvana can be attained here and now, that we do not have to wait for death to reach it. Nirvana is the realization of the Self; and after having once known that, if only for an instant, never again can one be deluded by the mirage of personality.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Death, Waiting, Personality

“But one thing it opened her eyes to, and made certain from the first instant of her new consciousness, namely, that since she loved him she could not keep her promise to marry him.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Dr. Heidenhoff's Process http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7052/7052-h/7052-h.htm (1880), Ch. 8.

Love

“When Sir Winton Turnbull [who represented a large rural seat], a slow and sometimes stumbling speaker, was raving and ranting on the adjournment and shouted: "I am a Count–ry member". I interjected "I remember". Sir Winton could not understand why, for the first time in all the years he had been speaking in the House, there was instant and loud applause from both sides.”

Gough Whitlam (1916–2014) Australian politician, 21st Prime Minister of Australia

From a speech during a debate on the question That Politicians Have Lost Their Sense Of Humour http://whitlamdismissal.com/2000/05/24/whitlam-sense-of-humour-debate.html, Sydney Town Hall, 24 May 2000

Understanding, Time, Housing

“It took them only an instant to cut off that head, but France may not produce another like it in a century.”

Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813) Italian mathematician and mathematical physicist

As quoted by William Hughes, Annual Editions: Western Civilization (1997) p. 64; about the beheading of his friend Antoine Lavoisier.

“If I had the force to overthrow these despotic laws I would use it without an instant's hesitation or delay, but I haven't got it, and so I am law-abiding under protest - not from scruple - and bide my time.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

Sound Socialist Tactics (1912)

Law, Time

“In the instant that you love someone,
In the second that the hammer hits,
Reality runs up your spine,
And the pieces finally fit.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

The One
Song lyrics, The One (1992)

Love, Reality

“I feel that most illusionists, magicians and prestidigitators have lost their sense of magic. A movie, a painting, a sunset or a piece of music are sometimes more magical than many 'magic tricks'. Most of our contemporary magicians arouse pity or compassion and don't allow the spectators to dream about other worlds. Magic is not the trick you're doing. Magic is a certain mood, an atmosphere; the absolute beauty of the instant when Man meets the sacred; where the walls of our reality open and, beyond them, infinity appears. The magicians are guides who may, at their will, travel from one universe to another, bringing you with them.”

Christian Chelman (1957) magician

Christian Chelman, 1993, Capricornian Tales, L & L Publishing, p. 6

World, Beauty, Dreams, Music

“As far as the sensory experience of the spectator goes, the most outstanding American kinetic artist is unquestionably the Chinese-born Wen-Ying Tsai. His pieces, which are perfect on the technological level, serve the primary purpose of giving a complete visual experience to the spectator, whose sound solicitations provoke a choreographic, chromatic and rhythmic response in the ‘cybernetic sculptures’. […]
György Kepes has commented enthusiastically on the ‘magic rhythms emanating from this swaying, dancing steel trembling with life’, and he has also noted the sense of ‘an instant fellowship, a spontaneous celebration’ which is re-created in their presence. As he concludes: ‘Rhythm is friendship and in Tsai’s work there is friendship of light, sound and our own heart-beats.’
If this appraisal testifies to the success with which Tsai affects the sensory and emotional responses of the spectator, we must not neglect the fact that he is also addressing himself to reason and the scientific element in his audience. In effect, the observer can enter an almost mathematical relationship with these works, and sharpen his perceptual powers through the exact assessment of the various aesthetic parameters of vibration, sound, colour, wave movement, etc.”

Frank Popper (1918) French art historian

Frank Popper, Art--Action and Participation, New York University Press, 1975, p. 214

Life, Friendship, Mathematics, Sense

“The dinner that evening was dreadful, the epitome of English vacuity…they were all the same, each mind set in the same weird armour, like an archosaur’s ruff, like a fringe of icicles. All I heard the whole evening was the tinkle of broken ice-needles as people tried timidly and vainly to reach through the stale fence of words, tinkle, tinkle, and then withdraw. Nobody behaved with breadth, with warmth, with naturalness, and finally it became pathetic. We were all the same; I hardly said anything, but that made me no more innocent – or less conditioned. The solemn figures of the Old Country, the Queen, the Public School, Oxbridge, the Right Accent, People Like Us, stood around the table like secret police, ready to crush down in an instant on any attempt at an intelligent European humanity.* We…were held by those cloud-grey shapes on the world’s blue rim. Death machines holding thousands of gum-chewing, contraceptive-carrying men; for some reason more 30 years away than 30 miles; as if we were looking into the future, not the south; into a world where there were no more Prosperos, no private domains, no Poetries, fantasies, tender sexual promises…I felt acutely the fragility of time itself…”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Death, Men, People, Secret

“The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

p, 125
Jacques le Fataliste (1796)

Children, Change, Heart

“It was my sophomore year at Yale, going through the food line for dinner, and I wanted a chicken breast, but the way they put it on my plate – all of a sudden it reminded me of my mom’s dog – and at that moment I was instantly on the outside of the food chain. I just couldn’t be a part of it. It was very personal to me in an instant, all because of a big breast of chicken that was oddly plated and slightly pink and I couldn’t do it. At first all I could think to eat was peanut butter and bread, so I put on a bunch of weight, but over the years it’s gotten a lot easier because people are much hipper to the fact that a plant based lifestyle is healthier for us. So it’s gotten so easy and so delicious to be vegan.”

Bellamy Young (1970) American artist

"Bellamy Young: The First Lady of Scandal Talks Animals, Veganism and Random Acts of Kindness", interview with The Pet Press (November 2013) http://www.thepetpress-la.com/bellamy-young.html.

People, Food, Dogs, Way

“And the other thing… that I will say is, when I spoke earlier about the world being broke, I was somewhat being facetious, because every generation has their challenge. And things change rapidly, and life gets better in an instant.”

Jon Stewart (1962) American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian

College of William & Mary Commencement Address (2004)

Life, World, Change

“Longing and desire goes further than instant satisfaction. That's human nature.”

Anna Sui (1964) American fashion designer

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

Nature

“There isn't any division of time to express the marrow of our lives, the time between the explosion of lead from the muzzle and the meat impact, between the impact and the darkness. There's only barren instant replay that shows nothing new. I shot her; she fell; and there was an indescribable moment of silence, an infinite duration of time, and we all stepped back, watching the ball go around and around, ticking, bouncing, lighting for an instant, going on, heads and tails, red and black, odd and even…I think that moment ended. I really do. But sometimes, in the dark, I think that hideous random moment is still going on, that the wheel is even yet in spin, and I dreamed all the rest. What must it be like for a suicide coming down from a high ledge? I'm sure it must be a very sane feeling. That's probably why they scream all the way down.”

Stephen King book Rage

Rage (1977)

Dreams, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“The two guides call out to a man early and late. And yet, no, for when remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The inner agitation of the heart understands what remorse insists upon, that the eleventh hour has come. For in the sense of time, the old man’s age is the eleventh hour; and the instant of death, the final moment in the eleventh hour. The indolent youth speaks of a long life that lies before him. The indolent old man hopes that his death is still a long way off. But repentance and remorse belong to the eternal in a man.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, 1847 p. 40-41
1840s, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), Purity of Heart (1847)

Life, Death, God, Youth

“The sudden and abrupt deletion of all individuals occupying the lower bands of the Tone Scale from the social order would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone and would interrupt the dwindling spiral into which any society may have entered.”

L. Ron Hubbard book Science of Survival

Source: Science of Survival (1951), p. 170.

“And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Sputnik Sweetheart

Beauty, Travel, Star, Reality

“In fact, this infinitesimally spread-out consciousness is a direct feeling of its contents as spread out. In an infinitesimal interval we directly perceive the temporal sequence of its beginning, middle, and end… Now upon this interval follows another, whose beginning is the middle of the former, and whose middle is the end of the former. Here we have an immediate perception of the temporal sequence of its beginning, middle and end, or say, of the second, third, and fourth instants.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Law of Mind (1892)

Feeling

“Never been lonely,
Never been lied to,
Never had to scuffle in fear,
Nothing to dive to,
Born at the instant,
The church bells chime,
The whole world whispering,
You're born at the right time.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Born at the Right Time
Song lyrics, The Rhythm of the Saints (1990)

World, Fear, Time

“When I stand up from my writing desk, "John Banville", or "Benjamin Black" – that is, the one whose name will appear on the title page – vanishes on the instant, since he only existed while the writing was being done.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville on the birth of his dark twin, Benjamin Black (2011)

Appearance

“I tweet, therefore my entire life has shrunk to 140 character chunks of instant event and predigested gnomic wisdom. And swearing.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Neil Gaiman's Twitter stream http://twitter.com/neilhimself, Tweet ID # 1178514410, (5 February 2009) http://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/1178514410

Life, Wisdom

“In a certain sense the phrase "I am still alive" can never be sent as it cannot be received by the addressee instantaneously…It is only valid at the very instant that it is being written, and in the very next second it no longer is a certainty. If the addressee receives the telegram a few hours or days later and reads it, he merely knows that the sender was alive at the very instant the telegram was sent. But when he is reading the telegram, he is totally uncertain if the content of the text is still relevant or if it is still valid The difference, the small displacement between sending and receiving, is that particular unseizable glimpse of the presence of the artist. Likewise, it is a sentence of self-reassurance…"I am still alive."”

On Kawara (1933–2014) artist

The activity of telling oneself and the world "I am still alive." <br class="br">On Kawara, "1970 Telegram," as cited in: " On Kawara Today http://greg.org/archive/2014/07/10/on_kawara_today.html," By greg on July 10, 2014 8:27 PM.

World, Sense, Reading

“I recalled the ants I had watched as a child on the farm, building their hills one grain of sand at a time, only to have them senselessly destroyed in an instant by a passing foot. I'd pieced my life together the same way, slowly and agonizingly. Would it, too, be kicked callously into dust?”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Page 214
2000s, (2008)

Life, Way, Time

“The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience—but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm.”

Sarah Bakewell book How to Live

Source: How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in one Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010), p. 37.

Learning

“I testify that it is possible for believers to be so filled with the Holy Ghost that they can live many years on the earth conscious every day of a meetness for the inheritance of the saints in light, and of no shrinking back, because of a felt need of further inward cleansing, from an instant translation into the society of the holy angels and into the presence of the holy God.”

Daniel Steele (1824–1914) American Methodist pastor

Daniel Steele, Boston, March, 1888 in Forty Witnesses (1888) edited by S. Olin Garrison

God, Angels, Light

“And I say again, you need not worry any more about money. If I were to drop dead this instant, I have enough to double your present income if you never touched a cent of the principle. If you take a notion to do something that costs more than your income warrants, you need only let me know. You can have it.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Letter from Albania to Laura Ingalls Wilder, (October 27, 1926).

Money, Dead

“His eyes are quickened so with grief,
He can watch a grass or leaf
Every instant grow; he can
Clearly through a flint wall see,
Or watch the startled spirit flee
From the throat of a dead man.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"Lost Love," lines 1-6, from Treasure Box (1919).
Poems

Grass, Dead

“And what sort of country shall you build upon that watchword, General?" Lord Lyons asked. "You cannot be left entirely alone; you are become, as I said, a member of the family of nations. Further, this war has been hard on you. Much of your land has been ravaged or overrun, and in those places where the Federal army has been, slavery lies dying. Shall you restore it there at the point of a bayonet? Gladstone said October before last, perhaps a bit prematurely, that your Jefferson Davis had made an army, the beginnings of a navy, and, more important than either, a nation. You Southerners may have made the Confederacy into a nation, General Lee, but what sort of nation shall it be?" Lee did not answer for most of a minute. This pudgy little man in his comfortable chair had put into a nutshell his own worries and fears. He'd had scant time to dwell on them, not with the war always uppermost in his thoughts. But the war had not invalidated any of the British minister's questions- some of which Lincoln had also asked- only put off the time at which they would have to be answered. Now that time drew near. Now that the Confederacy was a nation, what sort of nation would it be? At last he said, "Your excellency, at this precise instant I cannot fully answer you, save to say that, whatever sort of nation we become, it shall be one of our own choosing.”

Harry Turtledove book The Guns of the South

It was a good answer. Lord Lyons nodded, as if in thoughtful approval. Then Lee remembered the Rivington men. They too had their ideas on what the Confederate States of America should become.
Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 183

Men, War, Fear, Family

“This explains the instant satisfaction and growing reward which comes to every man who aspires to a higher life, who covets wisdom, who pursues beauty, who idealizes and worships his ideals.”

John William Lloyd (1857–1940) American anarchist, sexologist, utopian theorist and author (1857-1940)

Source: The Natural Man (1902), p. 100

Life, Wisdom, Beauty

“The house of delusions is cheap to build, but draughty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

"Introductory Lecture" delivered on October 3, 1892 at University College, London.

Housing

“Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Maps and Legends http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol42/no2/p35.htm, Architectural Digest (April 2001)

Sense, Childhood

“For ordinary books are like meteors; each has its moment, that instant when it flies shrieking into the air, like a phoenix, all of its pages ablaze. For that moment, that single instant, we love them; although they are mere ashes by then. Sometimes, late at night, we wander in bitter resignation through their congealed pages, whilst they go on insisting, with their wooden clattering, like a rosary, on their dead formulæ.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Book” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/book1.htm <br class="br">His father, Books

Love, Books, Night, Dead

“When you can see through the fog for an instant, and you understand haltingly and briefly what good is, and how God is connected with that, it cannot help but put a hell of a perspective on things you perceive as problems, and help you discover multiple ways in which you have been numb. For that brief moment you feel that God's in His heaven and all's right with the world.”

Mark Heard (1951–1992) American musician and record producer

Life in the Industry: A Musician's Diary

God, World, Way, Feeling

“Up to eight feet long and as heavy as a lioness, the adult Komodo dragon brandishes steak-knifelike teeth - sharp, recurved blades with serrated cutting edges. Showing the same sagacity found in veteran Nile crocodiles, fully adult dragons know their hunting territory from years of experience. They know where to lie along hilly game trails, awaiting the light footsteps of a deer. Attacks are instant successes or failures because the ora has no stamina, and if it misses on the first short rush, it has little sustained speed for a long pursuit. When an attack succeeds, the cruel rows of slashing teeth cut fearful wounds on the rump and thigh of ambushed animals and the stricken prey may die of massive infection days later even if it manages to break free from the dragon's mouth. Tethered livestock suffer truly terrible cuts across the legs when an ora slinks into the compound under cover of the warm Indonesian nights. Several humans, both native and European visitors, have died in savage daylight attacks. The victims simply had no warning sign that the ora was waiting patiently a few feet from the trail's edge.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 62-63
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Lie, Fear, Game, Failure

“Every one, though born of God in an instant, yet undoubtedly grows by slow degrees.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Letter (27 June 1760), published in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley (1813) Vol. XVI, p. 109
As quoted in an 1856 edition of Works
General sources
Variant: Every one, though born of God in an instant, yea, and sanctified in an instant, yet undoubtedly grows by slow degrees.

God