91 Present Quotes

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Any artist will tell you he's really only interested in the stuff he's doing now. He will, always. It's true, and it should be like that.

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.

The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.

The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.

You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.

If you aren't in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.

I don't have any romanticism about any part of my past. I think of it only inasmuch as it gave me pleasure or helped me grow psychologically. That is the only thing that interests me about yesterday. I don't believe in yesterday, by the way. You know I don't believe in yesterday. I am only interested in what I am doing now.

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future.

The normal present connects the past and the future through limitation. Contiguity results, crystallization by means of solidification. There also exists, however, a spiritual present that identifies past and future through dissolution, and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet.

In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.

Nothing is there to come, and nothing past, But an eternal now does always last.

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.

For some strange reason, no matter where I go, the place is always called 'here'.

So let's take the good times as they go and I'll meet you further on up the road...

Lose not yourself in a far off time, seize the moment that is thine.

Live more and more in the Present, which is ever beautiful and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future.

'If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.'

I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields; - Reflection, you may come to-morrow, Sit by the fireside with Sorrow. - You with the unpaid bill, Despair, - You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care, - I will pay you in the grave, - Death will listen to your stave.

'People who live in the past generally are afraid to compete in the present. I've got my faults, but living in the past is not one of them. There's no future in it.'

Life - how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

These are the days of the endless summer These are the days, the time is now There is no past, there's only future There's only here, there's only now.

All history is modern history.

I've always lived in the moment.

At eighteen you sleep without memories.

In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time. On the sorrowing earth it is the unresting thorn, the bitter brew, the harsh wind off the sea, the old and the new dawn.

The word 'now' is like a bomb thrown through the window, and it ticks.

The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts. Life is not to be conceived on the analogy of a melodrama in which the hero and heroine go through incredible misfortunes for which they are compensated by a happy ending. I live and have my day, my son succeeds me and has his day, his son in turn succeeds him. What is there in all this to make a tragedy about?

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

I'll tell you this - No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.

Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations, for the sake of an ideal of happiness that may never be realised.

Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.

seeming's enough for slaves of space and time -ours is the now and here of freedom. Come

Perhaps I am not I even if my little dog knows me but anyway I like what I have and now it is today. ~ Ch. 5

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see, -painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them, and are willing to let the words go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. The past and future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking of it at this present moment, or because it influences you so that you, as a living being in the present, are that much different. The future has reality because one can bring it into his mind in the present. Past was the present at one time, and the future will be the present at some coming moment. To try to live in the 'when' of the future or the 'then' of the past always involves an artificiality, a separating one's self from reality; for in actuality one exists is the present. The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound.

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come.We have only today. Let us begin.

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come.We have only today. Let us begin.

'The greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The call for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior for our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. He has planted in us the seed of eternal life. The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a herenow.'

Thou who stealest fire, From the fountains of the past, To glorify the present; oh, haste, Visit my low desire! Strengthen me, enlighten me! I faint in this obscurity, Thou dewy dawn of memory.

I'm going to spend the rest of my life in the future, and possibly even longer.

Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last! Loitering slow, the Future creepeth - Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth - And motionless forever stands the Past.

The future is seconds ahead.

Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus.

People ask me, 'what was the best year for music?' I always say, this year is the best year for music. Prior to that it was the previous year.

My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me not to measure time by saying, 'It was yesterday, and will be tomorrow.' Before my Soul taught me, I imagined the past as an era not to be met with, and the future as an age that I would never witness. But now I know that in the brief moment of the present, all time exists, including everything that is in time - all that is eagerly anticipated, achieved, or realized. My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me not to define a place by saying 'here' or 'there'. Before my Soul taught me, I thought that when I was in any place on the earth I was remote from every other spot. But now I have learned that the place where I subsist is all places, and the space I occupy is all intervals.

Such children. So young, so playful. I'm glad they can still be that way. Someday, when the real adult responsibilities settle on them, they'll lose that. It will be replaces by a slower, quieter kind of play. But for now, they can cast away care and remember how good it is to be alive.... That's what happiness means, isn't it?

[W]e do live in a conceptual trough that encourages such yearning for unknown and romanticized greener pastures of other times. The future doesn't seem promising, if only because we can extrapolate some disquieting present trends into further deterioration: pollution, nationalism, environmental destruction, and aluminum bats. Therefore, we tend to take refuge in a rose-colored past [:]. I do not doubt the salutary, even the essential, properties of this curiously adaptive human trait, but we must also record the down side. Legends of past golden ages become impediments when we try to negotiate our current dilemma.

Le paradis terrestre est ou je suis.

The Now is alive with a curious life which defies the descriptive powers of such divers as swim ahead of the swine in search of pearls.

'Man's craving for the supernatural is as natural as our discounting of the present moment... The natural becomes trite and commonplace to us and we take refuge in an imaginary world above and beyond it.' (p.261}

Why thus longing, thus forever sighing For the far-off, unattained, and dim, While the beautiful all round thee lying Offers up its low, perpetual hymn?

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

I am in the present and only the present matters to me.

But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

'The future is no place to place your better days'

I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down.

Things are more like today than they have ever been before.

Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, and I'm going to be happy in it.

I'm not good at future planning. I don't plan at all. I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow. I don't have a day planner and I don't have a diary. I completely live in the now, not in the past, not in the future.

Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough, What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town, If juster battles are enacted now Between the ants upon this hummock's crown?

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

What if this present were the world's last night?

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits. (6.4311)

Labour not after riches first, and think thou afterwards wilt enjoy them. He who neglecteth the present moment, throweth away all that he hath. As the arrow passeth through the heart, while the warrior knew not that it was coming; so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.

Your big opportunity may be right where you are now.

And nothing to look backward to with pride, And nothing to look forward to with hope.

It is the future that creates his present. All is an interminable chain of longing.

The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.

Be reverent before the dawning day. Do not think of what will be in a year, or in ten years. Think of to-day. Leave your theories. All theories, you see, even those of virtue, are bad, foolish, mischievous. Do not abuse life. Live in to-day. Be reverent towards each day. Love it, respect it, do not sully it, do not hinder it from coming to flower. Love it even when it is gray and sad like to-day. Do not be anxious. See. It is winter now. Everything is asleep. The good earth will awake again. You have only to be good and patient like the earth. Be reverent. Wait. If you are good, all will go well. If you are not, if you are weak, if you do not succeed, well, you must be happy in that. No doubt it is the best you can do. So, then, why will? Why be angry because of what you cannot do? We all have to do what we can. . . . Als ich kann.'

What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here there, she survived. Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.

The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well.

I make war on the living, not on the dead.

... the kingdom of heaven is with us today.

We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible. There have been war, plague, scandal, and treason, and there is no way of our preventing their having taken place; the executioner became an executioner and the victim underwent his fate as a victim without us; all that we can do is to reveal it, to integrate it into the human heritage, to raise it to the dignity of the aesthetic existence which bears within itself its finality; but first this history had to occur: it occurred as scandal, revolt, crime, or sacrifice, and we were able to try to save it only because it first offered us a form. Today must also exist before being confirmed in its existence: its destination in such a way that everything about it already seemed justified and that there was no more of it to reject, then there would also be nothing to say about it, for no form would take shape in it; it is revealed only through rejection, desire, hate and love. In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men. But at the heart of his existence he finds the exigency which is common to all men; he must first will freedom within himself and universally; he must try to conquer it: in the light of this project situations are graded and reasons for acting are made manifest.