"Peace is when time doesn't matter as it passes by"
About this Quote
Maria Schell offers a compact, humane definition of peace: the moment when the clock loses its power and the passing of minutes stops feeling like a demand. Peace here is not the end of motion but a change in our relation to it. Time still moves, yet urgency, dread, and grasping fall away. The deadlines and reckonings that usually carve the day into scarce units recede, replaced by a sense of sufficiency. When time does not matter, one is not bored or indifferent; one is absorbed, safe, and at ease.
That insight carries the weight of Schells era. An Austrian-Swiss star of postwar European cinema, she came of age where time was freighted with alarms: curfews, separations, rebuilding. Against that backdrop, peace cannot simply mean a cease-fire. It is the restoration of inner spaciousness, the ability to live a moment without calculating the next. As a performer, she also knew the paradox of time on set, ruled by schedules yet capable of dissolving during a scene when presence takes over. The hours vanish not because they are denied, but because they are fully lived.
Philosophers have divided time into the measured and the felt, the chronicle of minutes and the swelling of experience. Schell points toward the latter. Peace is the expansion of the present until it no longer feels narrower than ones hopes or fears. It arrives in ordinary ways: a conversation that forgets the phone, work that becomes flow, a walk where the mind stops rehearsing its alarms. It is a social condition too, because only where there is safety and trust can time loosen its grip.
By situating peace in our experience of time, the line offers a test that bypasses slogans. Where time still bites, peace is incomplete. Where time passes and does not matter, life is quietly whole.
That insight carries the weight of Schells era. An Austrian-Swiss star of postwar European cinema, she came of age where time was freighted with alarms: curfews, separations, rebuilding. Against that backdrop, peace cannot simply mean a cease-fire. It is the restoration of inner spaciousness, the ability to live a moment without calculating the next. As a performer, she also knew the paradox of time on set, ruled by schedules yet capable of dissolving during a scene when presence takes over. The hours vanish not because they are denied, but because they are fully lived.
Philosophers have divided time into the measured and the felt, the chronicle of minutes and the swelling of experience. Schell points toward the latter. Peace is the expansion of the present until it no longer feels narrower than ones hopes or fears. It arrives in ordinary ways: a conversation that forgets the phone, work that becomes flow, a walk where the mind stops rehearsing its alarms. It is a social condition too, because only where there is safety and trust can time loosen its grip.
By situating peace in our experience of time, the line offers a test that bypasses slogans. Where time still bites, peace is incomplete. Where time passes and does not matter, life is quietly whole.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
|---|
More Quotes by Maria
Add to List
