Life & Wisdom Quote by Clifford D. Simak

Time, in Simak's hands, isn’t the reassuring metronome of clocks and calendars; it’s the most successful fiction humans have ever agreed to treat as infrastructure. The line performs a classic science-fiction maneuver: it takes something we use to organize wages, grief, memory, and history, then quietly kicks out the support beam. Calling time “still the great mystery” signals humility, but also impatience with our habit of mistaking measurement for understanding. We can count seconds; we can’t say what a second is.

The subtext is a jab at modern confidence. Mid-20th-century life was saturated with scientific authority and technological progress, yet physics itself was busy complicating time rather than clarifying it. Relativity makes time elastic, tied to motion and gravity; quantum theory turns “now” into a slippery proposition. Simak compresses that intellectual unease into a plainspoken provocation: if time is “no more than a concept,” then our most intimate stories about cause and effect might be narrative conveniences, not cosmic law.

There’s also an emotional stake hidden under the cool phrasing. If time might not “even exist,” then mortality, regret, and nostalgia wobble. The quote toys with a radical consolation and a radical threat: maybe loss isn’t as final as we feel, or maybe meaning itself is just an accounting system strapped onto an indifferent universe.

That’s why it works. Simak doesn’t offer metaphysical fireworks; he offers a simple sentence that destabilizes everyday life, the way good speculative fiction does: by making the familiar suddenly negotiable.