Relativity Quotes

“Time is an illusion.”
― Albert Einstein

“It is a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.”
― Jean Cocteau

“The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain't like he knows the cure for cancer and just ain't spitting it out.”
― Justin Halpern, Sh*t My Dad Says

“If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”
― Douglas Adams

“Time felt slower when we do nothing but wait.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Never look directly at the sun. Instead, look at the sunflower.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“When two things occur successively we call them cause and effect if we believe one event made the other one happen. If we think one event is the response to the other, we call it a reaction. If we feel that the two incidents are not related, we call it a mere coincidence. If we think someone deserved what happened, we call it retribution or reward, depending on whether the event was negative or positive for the recipient. If we cannot find a reason for the two events' occurring simultaneously or in close proximity, we call it an accident. Therefore, how we explain coincidences depends on how we see the world. Is everything connected, so that events create resonances like ripples across a net? Or do things merely co-occur and we give meaning to these co-occurrences based on our belief system? Lieh-tzu's answer: It's all in how you think.”
― Liezi, Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living

“Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.”
― John Archibald Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics

“But Einstein came along and took space and time out of the realm of stationary things and put them in the realm of relativity—giving the onlooker dominion over time and space, because time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.”
― Dimitri Marianoff, Einstein: An Intimate Study of a Great Man

“There is no such thing as magic, supernatural, miracle;
only something that's still beyond logic of the observer.”
― Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll. It does not mean that everything in life is relative.”
― Albert Einstein

“The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“A man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the 'size' of human suffering is absolutely relative.”
― Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“A relativist is an individual who doesn't know the difference between an adjective and an adverb.”
― Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist

“If you like it, you'll find a way to justify it.
But if you don't , you'll find ways to falsify it.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning 'til dee sun come up.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him.”
― Wolfgang Pauli

“Smartass Disciple: If you are really a master, then make me see miracles!
Master of Stupidity: Go to sleep and dream, then wake up thirty years later!”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“All space is relative. There is no such thing as size. The telescope and the microscope have produced a deadly leveling of great and small, far and near. The only little thing is sin, the only great thing is fear!

("The Jelly-Fish")”
― David H. Keller, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

“Morality—like velocity—is relative. The determination of it depends on what the objects around you are doing. All one can do is measure one's position in relation to them; never can one measure one's velocity or morality in terms of absolutes.”
― David Gerrold, Star Hunt

“There is no Jesus without Judas, no Martin Luther King, Jr., without the Klan; no Ali without Joe Frazier; no freedom without tyranny. No wisdom exists that does not include perspective. Relativity is the greatest gift.”
― Chris Crutcher, King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography

“Why is it so difficult for us to think in relative terms? Well, for the good reason that human nature loves absoluteness, and erroneously considers it as a state of higher knowledge.”
― Felix Alba-Juez, Who was Right: Ptolemy or Copernicus?

“I had a sneaking suspicion that time was not constant, but I guess I could never prove it. I suppose it didn’t really matter. I even had a theory that time didn’t go in straight line at all. I knew I was no Albert Einstein, but I had the sneaking suspicion that everything had happened, was happening, or would happen was really happening all the time. There was no past, present, and future. Everything was going on all at once and forever. If that was true, then each moment was eternity.”
― Mark A Roeder

“How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors, and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it’s a chimera, there’s no such thing, everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“A mathematician tells you that the wall of warped space prevents the Moon from flying out of its orbit yet can't tell you why an astronaut can go back and forth across that same space.”
― Bill Gaede

“The word far is too short for me to spell.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Ah, my love. An apocalypse is a relative thing, isn’t it?”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“Changes is the mother of time.
Absence of changes makes no time.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“It is fatally easy, under the conditions of the modern world, for a writer of genius to conceive of himself as a Messiah. Other writers, indeed, may have had profound insights before him; but we readily believe that everything is relative to its period of society, and that these insights have now lost their validity; a new generation is a new world, so there is always a chance, if not of delivering a wholly new gospel, of delivering one as good as new. Or the messiahship may take the form of revealing for the first time the gospel of some dead sage, which no one has understood before; which owing to the backward and confused state of men's minds has lain unknown to this very moment; or it may even go back to the lost Atlantis and the ineffable wisdom of primitive peoples. A writer who is fired with such a conviction is likely to have some devoted disciples; but for posterity he is liable to become, what he will be for the majority of his contemporaries, merely one among many entertainers. And the pity is that the man may have had something to say of the greatest importance: but to announce, as your own discovery, some truth long known to mankind, is to secure immediate attention at the price of ultimate neglect.”
― T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods : A Primer of Modern Heresy