# The Time Regulation Institute **Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar** | Translated by Maureen Freely & Alexander Dawe *Last accessed: January 21, 2026* --- ## The Hook > "We are people who live in a world of our own making! Everything is just as we like it." A satirical masterpiece about bureaucracy, identity, and the absurdity of trying to regulate the unregulatable. Tanpinar writes with a kind of melancholic humor that feels both deeply Turkish and universally human. --- ## On Sincerity & Writing > "Why write at all if you cannot say honestly what you mean? A sincerity of this order—disinterested and unconditional—by its nature requires close scrutiny and constant filtering. You must agree that it would be unthinkable to describe things as they are." --- ## On Human Nature > "began to look at people with eyes that wondered, 'Now, what use could he be to us?' and to see life as dough that could be kneaded by my own two hands." > "Humanity never did sit easily with pure equality, and people need the encouragement of a little incentive here and there. I can say with confidence that good is only ever achieved if an identifiable evil is subjected to punishment and shame." > "love of liberty is nothing more than a kind of snobbism." > "mankind's hell is mankind. There might very well be hundreds of diseases that will end our lives, hundreds of paths that may lead to our undoing, but all these pale next to the devastation that can be wrought by another human being." > "man who achieves a cynicism of such perfection can accept the world as it is until the end of time, for to be this cynical is to deny all humanity." --- ## On Self-Knowledge > "lump of gold concealed in my innermost depths, a bird trilling in a tree, sunlight playing on water." > "never chased after things I didn't need. I never wore myself out trying to fulfill doomed passions or ambitions. I never longed to be first in my class, or second or twentieth, for that matter." > "plunging into a new fantasy with every dawdling step." > "For in the life of one individual, there are more imperfections than any imagination could ever concoct; and over an individual's lifetime these flaws congeal to define his character." > "a part of me has turned away from the past, though I still claim it as my own." > "I have always had a spectator's frame of mind. My concern with the welfare and demeanor of others has always distracted me from my own woes." > "I was a hopeless shadow: who existed on those rare days when people looked him in the eye." --- ## On Time & Mortality > "Sometimes I consider just what strange creatures we are: we bemoan the brevity of our lives but do everything in our power to squander this thing we call 'the day' as quickly and mindlessly as we can." > "Modern life commands us to stay far from the notion of death." > "Some people spend their lives making good use of time, but in my life it has always stuck a foot out in front of me. I have tripped over time." --- ## On Fate & Destiny > "There comes a point in any man's life when he becomes conscious of his destiny. My father discovered his in the cruelest way imaginable." > "that a man ends up with the very thing he fears most." > "The office charged with our affairs in the palace of the preordained never errs, never neglects its responsibilities." > "effect names can have on our destiny." > "fairy tales always start with a name. Assign a name to your jacket or bow tie, and though they may be lacking in function or beauty, their identity suddenly shifts—voilà! they have acquired a personality." --- ## On Work & Success > "So this was how it was done. First it is determined that this thing called success has been achieved, and then the author of this success is sought out and duly congratulated, after which the author claims that the success belongs to the man who just congratulated him and promptly returns it." > "Just to start is success in itself." > "You need but ponder something closely to extract it from any system of logic." > "Being a realist does not mean seeing the truth for what it is. It is a question of determining our relationship with the truth in the way that is most beneficial for us." > "This is the impact a living human being can have on others." --- ## On Bureaucracy & Institutions > "But if we examine how we manage our affairs, we are hard-pressed to find any trace of reason at all." > "any enterprise, however serious at its outset, would soon be undone by an inscrutable logic." > "They each live in entirely separate, imaginary worlds. Yet they dream as a collective society." > "Everyone will have to come up with work based on the name of the position we give them." > "Anything with a name exists." > "an age in which bureaucracy has reached its zenith, an age of real freedom. I am in the process of establishing an absolute institution—a mechanism that defines its own function. What could be closer to perfection than that?" --- ## On Knowledge & Action > "Knowledge holds us back. Indeed it offers neither an end nor an aim. The main thing is to do, to create. If only they knew, if only they knew... But if they knew, they wouldn't be doing it. They'd never achieve the same innovation, the same excitement at spontaneous discovery." > "For creation is life. We are living individuals. We are people who choose life." > "As you go on your way, stymied by words at every step, life discovers something new every day." --- ## On Change & Identity > "You're changing, Hayri Bey, you're changing. And this should be a source of happiness. A new life, a new man... And there's no other choice, as you won't be coming back a second time." > "has reformed you, reorganized you, and recast you as a loveable person." > "Once I'd freed myself from my troubles I'd simply gone and replaced them." > "I had become a confabulation and the term of my sentence was indefinite; my life was presented to me in daily installments like a serial in a magazine." --- ## On Truth & Lies > "Throughout my life I have seen how lies are propped up, not only by those directly involved with them, but also by people with no particular reason to perpetuate them." > "was too busy rewriting the past, indeed even embellishing it. And why not? What more can we do than create the environment for ourselves to live in? Especially as we can't just accept the sharp blade of the present." > "a falsehood was a weapon, a means by which to embellish his life or his own person." --- ## Imagery & Language > "mired in a tireless search for a tunnel that would take him to the other side of the wall he called reality." > "His statements stuck like olive oil stains" > "his chin, which ended abruptly, like a fugitive struggling to break free of its unnatural contours." > "this voice wet with tears still ringing in my ears? Fear. Fear and man, fear and man's destiny, the struggle of man against man, and needless hostility." > "For what can a man ever really convey? What grief can one man truly share with another? The stars might speak to one another, but man can never communicate with man." > "a soft and battered soul" > "her hair aflame in the sulfurous cloud" > "capsized ship undulating in dead waters" > "one swollen conversation that burst like a spring deluge, carrying away everything in its path" > "Beyond us the sea and the night—a rich blue night that swims through a man like a fish from a dream whose silence has settled inside him." > "Man's only fortress is patience." > "fallen man has no friends" --- ## On Relationships & Family > "Having accepted her body as her sole source of support in this game of blindman's bluff that we call life, she came to appreciate its value." > "Hadn't they tied me to one place with their very presence, condemning me forever to circle like a workhorse around the same little spot?" > "No longer would I view the world through the prism of her pain and ill health" > "longed to be surrounded by the things of my life: my own poverty." --- ## Standout Aphorisms > "the important thing is to set the stage. Humans then live what they have been given. The trick is to give humankind a chance to be creative." > "You say she has no talent—well then, without a doubt she is an original." > "Great men ride the currents of the age." > "the saying goes: the blasphemous man builds his casket out of firewood." > "Am I forever to be forced into situations not of my own making?" --- ## Why This Book 127 highlights. More than any other book in recent memory. Tanpinar writes about a fictional bureaucracy tasked with "regulating" clocks—an absurdist premise that becomes a lens for examining how institutions shape identity, how names create reality, and how we all participate in collective fictions. The book is funny, sad, and deeply philosophical. It's Turkish modernist literature at its finest, and it deserves far more attention than it gets in the West. Connected to [[The Product Diary|Vibe Reader]]: This is exactly the kind of book where the density of insight demands a capture system. 127 moments I wanted to keep. On paper, most of those would have been lost.