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.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, Conquest of Happiness
The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.
EUGENE O'NEILL, Long Day's Journey Into Night
When you surrender to what is and so become fully present, the past ceases to have any power. You do not need it anymore. Presence is the key. Now is the key.
ECKHART TOLLE, The Power of Now
The days of life are consumed, one by one, without an object beyond the present moment; ever flying from the ennui of that, yet carrying it with us; eternally in pursuit of happiness, which keeps eternally before us. If death or bankruptcy happen to trip us out of the circle, it is matter for the buzz of the evening, and is completely forgotten by the next morning.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to Mrs. Bingham, Feb. 7, 1787
The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, The Living City
Zen lives in the present. The Whole teaching is: how to be in the present; how to get out of the past which is no more and how not to get involved in the future which is not yet, and just to be rooted, centered, in that which is.
OSHO, Zen: The Path of Paradox
I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.
TONI MORRISON, Time interview, Jan. 21, 1998
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
GEORGE ORWELL, Nineteen Eighty-Four
When people can't abide things as they are, when they can't abide the present, they do one of two things ... either they ... either they turn to a contemplation of the past ... or they set about to ... alter the future. And when you want to change something ... YOU BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
EDWARD ALBEE, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.
KARL MARX, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
In basketball -- as in life -- true joy comes from being fully present in each and every moment, not just when things are going your way.
PHIL JACKSON, Sacred Hoops
Under the sublime law of progress, the present outgrows the past. The great heart of humanity is heaving with the hopes of a brighter day. All the higher instincts of our nature prophesy its approach; and the best intellects of the race are struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfilment.
HORACE MANN, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, Midnight's Children
Today is the first and last day of forever.
STEPHENIE MEYER, Breaking Dawn
To stay present in everyday life, it helps to be deeply rooted within yourself; otherwise, the mind, which has incredible momentum, will drag you along like a wild river.
ECKHART TOLLE, The Power of Now
Live in the present, remember the past, and fear not the future, for it doesn't exist and never shall. There is only now.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI, Eldest
The future and the past are equally meaningless because they are nebulous entities, times that do not exist, containing events which have no echo because they are gone, or which hold no import because they are yet to happen. What is important is the here and now, and now, and now, and the spaces between the nows.
Tomorrows were full of awful things. Today, now, was the essential.
ARIANA FRANKLIN, Mistress of the Art of Death
- Tomorrow gives a beck'ning hand--
- I turn my face away;
- I'll not invite her to my home--
- I only love Today.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "Today"
We should not expect all the present to be as good as the best of the past.
The present is the food of the future.
- But we look ahead to the far off skies,
- For the years are flying fast,
- And we know that the present that round us lies
- Ere the light of a few more moments dies,
- Will with many loved and severed ties
- Fade into the mist-veiled past.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN, "The Beautiful Past"
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
EUGENE O'NEILL, A Moon for the Misbegotten
Wisely improve the Present. It is thine.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Hyperion
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand ... hopeless from the start.
SYLVIA PLATH, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Now seems pretty specious to me ... for it's just a hole, a little hole on whose rim we've been allowed, for an eye's blink, to perch, watching that flow ... in which the future hisses through to heap the potter's field of the past.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Dhalgren
All the past is not worth one today.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "New Year"
