I don’t know about you, but during my childhood, I used to think A LOT about time traveling. To be precise, I was interested in traveling into the future because I was curious about what the world would look like.
Nowadays, after a few heartbreaks, unrequited romances, and life disappointments, I still dream of time traveling, but this time, into the past. (No shit, Sherlock. ?)
I’m convinced that my whole life would’ve turned out completely different had I made a few different choices. CLICHE ALERT: Then again, they say that everything happens for a reason.
The choices we make can’t be categorized as wrong or right, but they are a necessary part of our personal development and growth.
If you’ve seen movies with time travel elements, Mr. Nobody or About Time, then you understand the complexity of this topic and the reason why I’m going into the depths of it.
Wait, is time travel possible?
Besides movies, there’s one more thing that can help us understand the concept of time travel (including the psychology behind it), and that is time travel quotes!
I hope you’re buckled up!
53 Best Time Travel Quotes
Time travel is an interesting concept that can be interpreted in various ways. These famous quotes about time travel will certainly catch your attention.
1. “Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp spacetime so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.” – Stephen Hawking
2. “In a sense, we all are time travelers! We are surviving each and every active time-point in this timeline…” – Aldrin Mathew
3. “I think time travel is really tricky. But if there’s a logic and a complete and well-thought-through paradigm for it, I think it can be really interesting. Some of my favorite time-travel movies just make me think and, you know, the ‘what if’ question becomes a big one.” – Daniel Dae Kim
4. “Time travel is a philosophical concept, not a scientific one. It is, in fact, as has been pointed out, scientific nonsense.” – Alexie Panshin
5. “Not only is the past of a person with no memory inaccessible; his ability to think about the future is imperiled. Time travel, then, is ultimately – and paradoxically – an exercise in remembering. And without that capacity, it simply cannot exist.” – Maria Konnikova
6. “I think the idea of time travel is very seductive.” – Dana Reeve
7. “I like the sci-fi channel. Just science in general. I came across a segment on time travel and how time travel is possible. We create a spaceship that’s moving at almost the speed of light, we go in that spaceship in outer space, and we fly around for a year, when we get back to Earth, Earth would’ve aged 10 years.” – Von Miller
8. “It’s this simple: Spacetime implies the possibility of time travel. How it would happen is a question for another time.” – Dilip D’souza
9. “The question of time travel features at the interface between two of our most successful yet incompatible physical theories – Einstein’s general relativity and quantum mechanics. Einstein’s theory describes the world at the very large scale of stars and galaxies, while quantum mechanics is an excellent description of the world at the very small scale of atoms and molecules.” – Martin Ringbauer
10. “Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible.” – Stephen Hawking
11. “Once the notion of time travel starts to come naturally to the human mind, it is supremely easy to assimilate it into our mode of thinking.” – Maria Konnikova
12. “Today, we know that time travel need not be confined to myths, science fiction, Hollywood movies, or even speculation by theoretical physicists. Time travel is possible. For example, an object traveling at high speeds ages more slowly than a stationary object. This means that if you were to travel into outer space and return, moving close to light speed, you could travel thousands of years into the Earth’s future.” – Clifford A. Pickover
13. “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” – Albert Einstein
14. “Time travel, by its very nature, was invented in all periods of history simultaneously.” – Douglas Adams
15. “Trust me: you make a movie about time travel, and you know for a fact humans will never travel through time. The paradoxes that come up just from trying to tell a story with time travel really illuminates the fact that it’s impossible. It will never happen. We can barely get through a movie that involves time travel.” – Doug Liman
16. “What’s important about the model is the idea that the past, present, and future are all equally real.” – Dr. Kristie Miller
17. “Shh! Listen! Someone’s coming! I think—I think it might be us!” – J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
18. “Look at anyone’s bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you’re going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that’s at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.” – Jonathan Nolan
19. “I cannot wait to get up there and experience space travel for the first time. It will be a dream come true.” – David Mackay
20. “The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by the laws of physics.” – Brian Greene
21. “There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.” – H. G. Wells
22. “I have a secret project which adds four hours every day to the 24 hours we have. There’s a bit of time travel involved.” – Sundar Pichai
23. “One may never get to know how fast the time travels till one gets in that position to race against time.” – Neel Preet
24. “The truth is, time travel is hard, and people are lazy.” – Margaret Peterson Haddix
25. “The best evidence that time travel is impossible is the fact that we haven’t been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.” – Guillaume Musso
26. “Forward time travel is no big deal, being, in reality, nothing but slow aging.” – Katinka Ridderbos
Inspirational Time Travel Quotes
27. “Originally, the burden of proof was on physicists to prove that time travel was possible. Now the burden of proof is on physicists to prove there must be a law forbidding time travel.” – Michio Kaku
28. “If I could time travel into the future, my first port of call would be the point where medical technology is at its best because, like most people on this planet, I have this aversion to dying.” – Neal Asher
29. “In Einstein’s equation, time is a river. It speeds up, meanders, and slows down. The new wrinkle is that it can have whirlpools and fork into two rivers. So, if the river of time can be bent into a pretzel, create whirlpools and fork into two rivers, then time travel cannot be ruled out.” – Michio Kaku
30. “Time travel offends our sense of cause and effect – but maybe the universe doesn’t insist on cause and effect.” – Edward M. Lerner
31. “I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn’t forbidden by the overarching laws of physics, we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.” – David Deutsch
32. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust
33. “The simplest way out of the puzzle of time travel is to say that it can’t be done. That’s very likely the right answer. However, we don’t know for sure.” – Sean M. Carroll
34. “Imagination makes us aware of limitless possibilities. How many of us haven’t pondered the concept of infinity or imagined the possibility of time travel? In one of her poems, Emily Brontё likens imagination to a constant companion, but I prefer to think of it as a built-in entertainment system.” – Alexandra Adornetto
35. “When you look at the calculation, it’s amazing that every time you try to prove or disprove time travel, you’ve pushed Einstein’s theory to the very limits where quantum effects must dominate. That’s telling us that you really need a theory of everything to resolve this question. And the only candidate is string theory.” – Michio Kaku
36. “I find the whole time travel question very unsettling if you take it to its logical extension. I think it might eventually be possible, but then what happens?” – William Shatner
37. “Time travel and teleportation will have to wait. It may take centuries to master these technologies. But within the coming decades, we will understand dark matter, perhaps test string theory, find planets which can harbor life, and maybe have Brain 2.0, i.e., our consciousness on a disk which will survive even after we die.” – Michio Kaku
38. “I’ve always been a big fan of time travel, and I’m very into the notion that someday we’ll be able to do it. Beam me up!” – Scott Bakula
39. “Time travel was once considered scientific heresy, and I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labeled a ‘crank.’” – Stephen Hawking
40. “In a great many stories that deal with time travel, there’s usually somebody who knows how time travel works. They lay out the rules.” – Diana Gabaldon
41. “Unlike some of the time-travel movies I love, like ‘Primer’ or ’12 Monkeys,’ ‘Looper’ is not about time travel. It’s about this situation that time travel creates and the people dealing with that situation. So narratively, the big challenge was to have time travel get out of the way.” – Rian Johnson
42. “In Japan, there’s a TV series called Jin. It deals with time travel. I like stories about time travel. It’s a story about people living in the modernday that travel back to the Edo era. Those things really interest me.” – Yuji Horii
43. “Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime, time will do the traveling for us.” – Maria Konnikova
44. “Antigravity, teleportation, time travel, energetic DNA evolution, and consciousness transformation could create a world few of us ever even dreamed of.” – David Wilcock
45. “Technologies that may be realized in centuries or millennia include: warp drive, traveling faster than the speed of light, parallel universes; are there other parallel dimensions and parallel realities? Time travel that we mentioned and going to the stars.” – Michio Kaku
46. “Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book.” – David Deutsch
47. “Thinking about time travel may seem like something humans have been doing since the first caveman dropped the first rock on his foot. But, even to begin to imagine the possibility of time travel, your mind must be able to wrap itself around the notion of a past and a future.” – Maria Konnikova
48. “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” – Albert Einstein
49. “The basic idea, if you’re very, very optimistic, is that if you fiddle with the wormhole openings, you can make it not only a shortcut from a point in space to another point in space, but a shortcut from one moment in time to another moment in time.” – Brian Greene
50. “Time travel may be possible, but it is not practical.” – Stephen Hawking
51. “If you can bend space, there is a possibility of you twisting space.” – Ron Mallet
52. “Sometimes I wish that I could go into a time machine right now and just look at myself and say, ‘Calm down. Things are gonna be fine. Things are gonna be all great. Just relax.’” – Tristan Wilds
53. “My mind has a time machine; it can travel back to the past when I close my eyes, and in my dreams, it travels to the future.” – Munia Khan
See also: 68 Quotes About Loving Someone Who Doesn’t Love You Back
18 Going Back In Time Quotes
Would going back in time to make your life better? Is moving on a recipe for happiness? These motivational quotes about going back in time will provide answers.
1. “People who think about time travel stories sometimes think that going back in time would be fun because you would have all the information you needed to be much more astute than the people there, when the truth is, of course, you wouldn’t.” – Octavia E. Butler
2. “The most useful form of time travel would be to go back a year or two and rectify the mistakes we made.” – Matt Lucas
3. “With ‘Back to the Future,’ time-traveling lets you go back to a better, more comfortable life where your parents are happy, and you have a lot of money – the capitalistic version of time travel.” – Celine Sciamma
4. “I like science fiction, I like fantasy, I like time travel, so I had this idea: What if you had a phone that could call into the past?” – Rainbow Rowell
5. “We cannot go back in time and change the past, but we can repent.” – Dieter F. Uchtdorf
6. “We would go back and maybe not say that thing to our dad that we said, or maybe be a little nicer to someone who we cared about and had a relationship with when we were young. You know, they’re subtle things, but we carry those with us forever. And I think that regret and time travel are intrinsically linked.” – Colin Trevorrow
7. “’Closed timelike curve’ is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.” – Kip Thorne
8. “You’ve got to always go back in time if you want to move forward.” – Snoop Dogg
9. “When you ghost hunt, you kind of time travel: you get that residue of the past.” – Zak Bagans
10. “But if I could go back in time, I wouldn’t do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?” – Cheryl Strayed
11. “Life is a learning experience. All you can do is learn from your mistakes, but you can’t go back in time.” – Amy Dumas
12. “Don’t time travel into the past, roaming through the nuances as if they can change. Don’t bookmark pages you’ve already read.” – James Altucher
13. “You know you’re a hopeless record nerd when your time travel fantasies always come around to how cool it would be to go back to 1973 and buy all the great funk and jazz and salsa records that came out that year on tiny obscure labels and are now really rare and expensive.” – Adam Mansbach
14. “I wish I could freeze time or go back in time and watch my kids grow up all over again because it is just going by too fast.” – Robert Rodriguez
15. “There’re going to be moments in life where you are going to want to turn back — that’s when you have to go on.” – Ritu Ghatourey
16. “If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you’d forgotten about, you’d weep looking at that day.” – Alexander Payne
17. “If time travel were possible, you still wouldn’t be able to change the past – it’s already happened!” – Sean M. Carroll
18. “My style is like, if I were to time travel to the ’80s or ’90s, I would fit in, but they would be like, ‘Something’s off about her.’” – Nicole Byer
See also: Everything Happens For A Reason Quotes: 58 Inspiring Words Of Wisdom
Back To Reality: 12 Best Travel Quotes
Given that time travel is still uncertain, I’ve compiled a list of adventure travel quotes to help you get out of your comfort zone and trigger your wanderlust. Pick your favorite travel quotes and let them be your muse. (Also, feel free to use them for Instagram captions.)
1. “If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.” – Anthony Bourdain
2. “Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.” – Dalai Lama
3. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
4. “Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – H. Jackson Brown Jr.
5. “Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” – Jack Kerouac
6. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” – Mark Twain
7. “Live with no excuses and travel with no regrets.” – Oscar Wilde
8. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost
9. “I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel’s sake.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
10. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson
11. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck
12. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley
See also: 97 Sweet And Inspirational Travel Love Quotes
Time Travel. Travel. Discover.
Remember that you have the most powerful tool at your disposal: your imagination. With it, you can time travel anytime you want.
I hope the above time travel quotes and inspirational travel quotes inspired you to think outside the box and go someplace you’ve never been before.
Good luck, and don’t forget to fasten your seat belt! ?