Showing posts with label St. Augustine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label St. Augustine. Show all posts

14 Sept 2014

Time is a distention of the soul

Since I measure the movement of a body by time and not the other way around – since a long time can only be measured by a short time – and since no physical movement offers a fixed unit of measurement for comparison, the movement of the stars being assumed to be variable – it remains that the extension of time is a distention of the soul.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) pp. 15-16

15 Feb 2012

But the two times, past and future, how can they be, since the past is no more and the future is not yet? On the other hand, if the present were always present and never flowed away into the past, it would not be time at all, but eternity. But if the present is only time, because it flows away into the past, how can we say that it is? For it is, only because it will cease to be.

St. Augustine, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History (Verso, 2007) p. 104