To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French.
- Mark Twain
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
- Berenice Abbott
Because when you watch U.S. television, all the presenters and reporters, they're all out of central casting.
- Diane Abbott
When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.
- Aberjhani
Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.
- Aberjhani
We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.
- Diane Ackerman
The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have any power over the present. Health and hope grew strong in them, and they were content with each good day as it came, taking pleasure in every meal, and in every word and song.
- J R R Tolkien
So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.
- J R R Tolkien
For a while the hobbits continued to talk and think of the past journey and of the perils that lay ahead; but such was the virtue of the land of Rivendell that soon all fear and anxiety was lifted from their minds. The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have any power over the present. Health and hope grew strong in them, and they were content with each good day as it came, taking pleasure in every meal, and in every word and song.
- J R R Tolkien
Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.
- Douglas Adams
Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present Generation to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.
- John Adams
You may shelve your Shakespearian plans for the present. I am going to play Peter Pan.
- Maude Adams
If it were not for the presents, an elopement would be preferable.
- George Ade
The attainment of the present status of Thailand has to depend on the ability or the actions of all the inhabitants of the country.
- Bhumibol Adulyadej
Since that time up until the present time, there have been progress, and changes all through the time. The changes have not come by themselves; these changes have come from the doings of everyone in the country.
- Bhumibol Adulyadej
Therefore, I think that in the celebration of the 50 years of the present reign, there must be research on the changes that the country has undergone, and in the future, it could be used as a lesson for our future actions.
- Bhumibol Adulyadej
The present is not an instant shared by all space, but an event, i.e. an instant at a place in space.
- Felix Alba Juez
The past and the future are not a collection of instants shared by all space, but a collection of events that correspond to a possible relation of causal order with the present event.
- Felix Alba Juez
Our contradictions. We are in such a hurry to grow up, and then we long for our lost childhood. We make ourselves ill earning money, and then spend all our money on getting well again. We think so much about the future that we neglect the present, and thus experience neither the present nor the future. We live as if we were never going to die, and die as if we had never lived.
- Paulo Coelho
Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment though, is outside of time, it's Eternity. It isn;t what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
You can't measure time the way you measure the distance between two points. "Time" doesn't pass. We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we're always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better, about the consequences of our actions, and about why we didn't act as we should have.
- Paulo Coelho
If you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better.
- Paulo Coelho
The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity. In India they use the word "karma" for lack of any better term. But it's a concept that's rarely given a proper explanation. It isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
Time that never ends, that never passes, that remains in the present, where all of life's secrets lie.
- Paulo Coelho
If you concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man.
- Paulo Coelho
We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; were always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better, about the consequences of our actions, and about why we didn't act as we should have.
- Paulo Coelho
This is the present moment. Learn how to gobble it up without fear or guilt.
- Paulo Coelho
If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man.
- Paulo Coelho
don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in
the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy
man.
- Paulo Coelho
It isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
lived only for the present, because the present was full of surprises.
- Paulo Coelho
I don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we're living now.
- Paulo Coelho
In magic - and in life - there is only the present moment, the now. You can't measure time the way you measure the distance between two points. 'Time' doesn't pass.
- Paulo Coelho
Travelling to past lives is like making a hole in the floor and letting the flames of the fire in the apartment below scorch and burn the present
- Paulo Coelho
Everything which is done in the present, affects the future by consequence, and the past by redemption.
- Paulo Coelho
In life, there is only the present moment, the now. You can't measure time the way you measure distance between two points. "Time" doesn't pass.
- Paulo Coelho
Because I don't live in either my past or my future.I'm interested only in the present.
- Paulo Coelho
That's all anyone has, and it's always brief, although, of course, some people believe they have a past where they can accumulate things and a future where they will accumulate still more. By the way, speaking of the present moment, do you masturbate a lot?
- Paulo Coelho
The secret is here in the present. If you pat attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better, Forget about the future and live each day according to the teachings, confident that God loves his children. Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity.
- Paulo Coelho
Do not concern yourself with what you know or what you do not know. Do not think about the past or the future, merely allow God's hands to write the surprises of the present on each new day.
- Paulo Coelho
I'm alive. When I'm eating that's all I think about. If I'm on the march, I just concentrate on marching. If I have to fight,it will be just as good a day as any to die. If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. Life is the moment we are living now.
- Paulo Coelho
We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use in the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It's always new.
- Paulo Coelho
It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
To envision the future; you must forget the past and make the present a memory
- Jeremy Aldana
I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs.
- Hannes Alfven
If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.
- Dante Alighieri
Memories did one no good, not when one knew the truth in the present
- Cassandra Clare
Memories do one no good, not when one knew the truth in the present.
- Cassandra Clare
There is a reason they call God a presence - because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.
- Elizabeth Gilbert
The great secret about goals and visions is not the future they describe but the change in the present they engender.
- David Allen
The last time I was in Chile, I was hypnotized by a friend who is studying to be a curandero, a healer, who led me back through several incarnations. It wasn't easy to return to the present, however, since my friend hadn't reached that part of the course, but the experiment was well worth the effort because I discovered that in former lives I was not Genghis Khan, as my mother believes.
- Isabel Allende
Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there's not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory.
- Nicole Krauss
In this world, all--men, women, and kings--must live for the present. We can only live for the future for God
- Alexandre Dumas
Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections an idea which carries you back to other times, to other places which, very likely, have no connection with the present time and place.
- Alexandre Dumas
Crazy Horse saw history as integrated in the present, incorporated into daily life.
- Stephen Ambrose
The world has not been in existence from eternity nor could it have been according to the present dispensation and ordering of things.
- William Ames
When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
- Martin Amis
The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present.
- Martin Amis
I don't really think about anything too much. I live in the present. I move on. I don't think about what happened yesterday.
- Pamela Anderson
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.
- Sparky Anderson
I think of the past and the future as well as the present to determine where I am, and I move on while thinking of these things.
- Tadao Ando
Sometimes I think I live more closely to the past than the present.
- Patricia Briggs
The future is keeping you out of the present time.
- Van Morrison
The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present.
- Barbara De Angelis
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
- Maya Angelou
... the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future.
- Hermann Hesse
I do think it's important to live in the present because in that way you won't be living in a state of regret.
- Francesca Annis
The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.
- David Antin
The rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.
- Thomas Jefferson
Peace and abstinence from European interferences are our objects, and so will continue while the present order of things in America remain uninterrupted.
- Thomas Jefferson
If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?
- Thomas Jefferson
The absurd consequences of neglecting structure but using the concept of order just the same are evident if one examines the present terminology of information theory.
- Rudolf Arnheim
I am not sure that digging in our past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them. I have reached a stage at which one hopes to be forgiven for concentrating on how to get through the present.
- Diana Athill
In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred,It is a paryer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present.
- Amelia Atwater Rhodes
Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.
- Margaret Atwood
Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. They dispense no thought with the calculation of risk and profit, they take no thought for the future, they're forced to spearpoint into the present tense. - Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)
- Margaret Atwood
He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.
- Margaret Atwood
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.
- W H Auden
How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.
- Saint Augustine Of Hippo
Confine yourself to the present.
- Marcus Aurelius
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
- Marcus Aurelius
No one can lose either the past or the future - how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess?... It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived: and if this is all he has, he cannot lose what he does not have.
- Marcus Aurelius
Unhappy am I because this has happened to me.- Not so, but happy am I, though this has happened to me, because I continue free from pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearing the future.
- Marcus Aurelius
How she might have felt had there been no Captain Wentworth in the case, was not worth enquiry; for there was a Captain Wentworth: and be the conclusion of the present suspense good or bad, her affection would be his forever. Their union, she believed, could not divide her more from other men, than their final separation.
- Jane Austen
The evils arising from the loss of her uncle were neither trifling nor likely to lessen; and when thought had been freely indulged, in contrasting the past and the present, the employment of mind and dissipation of unpleasant ideas which only reading could produce made her thankfully turn to a book.
- Jane Austen
Are you consulting your own feelings in the present case, or do you imagine that you are gratifying mine?
- Jane Austen
but a sanguine temper, though for ever expecting more good than occurs, does not always pay for its hopes by any proportionate depression. it soon flies over the present failure, and begins to hope again.
- Jane Austen
My dear," replied her husband, "I have two small favours to request. First, that you will allow me the free use of my understanding on the present occasion; and secondly, of my room. I shall be glad to have the library to myself as soon as may be.
- Jane Austen
Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'.
- Paul Auster
What matters is to live in the present, live now, for every moment is now. It is your thoughts and acts of the moment that create your future. The outline of your future path already exists, for you created its pattern by your past.
- Sai Baba
An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.
- Irving Babbitt
Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.
- Lauren Bacall
You stream almost too violently, fountain of delight! And often you empty the cup again, by wanting to fill it!
***
And if a friend does you wrong, then say: "I forgive you what you have done to me; that you have done it to yourself, however-how could I forgive that!"
***
Sex: for free hearts, innocent and free, the garden happiness of the earth, an overflowing of thanks to the present from all the future.
***
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Out of the past come the standards for judging the present; standards in turn to be shaped by the practice of present-day dramatists into broader standards for the next generation.
- George P Baker
I did not know, however, that ancient glories imply, at least in the middle of the present century, present fatigue and, quite probably, paranoia; that there is a limit to the role of intelligence in human affairs; and that no people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
- James Baldwin
It is a mistake, too, to say that the face is the mirror of the soul. The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair.
- Oscar Wilde
Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day.
- Muriel Barbery
..if you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don't you see?
- Muriel Barbery
...we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity.
That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.
- Muriel Barbery
I tried to put the displacement between parenthesis, to put a last period in a long sentence of the sadness of history, personal and public history. But I see nothing except commas. I want to sew the times together. I want to attach one moment to another, to attach childhood to age, to attach the present to the absent and all the presents to all absences, to attach exiles to the homeland and to attach what I have imagined to what I see now.
- Mourid Barghouti
If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.
- Julian Barnes
I haven't fought with anyone else in over two thousand years. (Kyrian)
Well, you're never too old to learn. (Amanda)
You can't teach an old dog new tricks. (Kyrian)
There's no time like the present. (Amanda)
Time is of the essence. (Kyrian)
God helps those who help themselves. (Amanda)
You're not going to let me win this, are you? (Kyrian)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
I am old enough to know that time passing is just a trick, a convenience. Everything is always there, still unfolding, still happening. The past, the present, and the future, in the noggin eternally, like brushes, combs and ribbons in a handbag.
- Sebastian Barry
Under the present conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its function, to gift-giving, to squandering without reciprocation.
- Georges Bataille
We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future.
- Gregory Bateson
The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.
- Charles Baudelaire
In February, the overcast sky isn't gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It's a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you're inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely.
- Charles Baxter
The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future.
Cut loose the past; it is dead weight.
Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.
- Stephen Baxter
Mindfulness allows you to face the past with courage, whether it is scarred with pain or caressed with joy, and it gently holds you in the safe haven of the present without allowing you to become overwhelmed with what may or may not be waiting in the future.
- Deborah A Beasley
One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.
- Simone De Beauvoir
The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.
- Simone De Beauvoir
Accordingly, globalization is not only something that will concern and threaten us in the future, but something that is taking place in the present and to which we must first open our eyes.
- Ulrich Beck
There is a foundation for our lives, a place in which our life rests. That place is nothing but the present moment, as we see, hear, experience what is. If we do not return to that place, we live our lives out of our heads. We blame others; we complain; we feel sorry for ourselves. All of these symptoms show that we're stuck in our thoughts. We're out of touch with the open space that is always right here.
- Charlotte Joko Beck
The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.
- Blaise Pascal
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
- Blaise Pascal
Our imagination so magnifies the present, because we are continually thinking about it, and so reduces eternity, because we do not think about it, that we turn eternity into nothing and nothing into eternity, and all this is so strongly rooted within us that all our reason cannot save us from it.
- Blaise Pascal
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
- Albert Camus
The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.
- Albert Camus
Well, Mr. Antichrist, that's all for the present!
- Albert Camus
I am going to produce a movie of my own. I am not going to stick to the time-tested formulae of Hindi cinema. I want to make a film for the present generation. So there will be a lot of new faces in the film.
- Kabir Bedi
Anne looked at the white young mother with a certain awe that had never entered into her feelings for Diana before. Could this pale woman with the rapture in her eyes be the little black-curled, rosy-cheeked Diana she had played with in vanished schooldays? It gave her a queer desolate feeling that she herself somehow belonged only in those past years and had no business in the present at all.
- L M Montgomery
Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day.
- Saul Bellow
The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.
- Peter Benchley
You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.
- John Steinbeck
Eternal Life is life itself, real life, which can also be lived in the present age and is no longer challenged by physical death.
- Pope Benedict Xvi
Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.
- Ruth Benedict
To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present.
- Bo Bennett
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
- John Berger
Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
- John Berger
Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.
- Franklin D Roosevelt
It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.
- Franklin D Roosevelt
In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.
- Henri Bergson
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
- Henri Bergson
What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.
- Haruki Murakami
The past and the present, might we say, go like this. The future is a maybe. Yet we look back on the darkness that obscures the path that brought us fair, we only come up with another indefinite maybe. The only thing we perceive with any clarity is the present moment, and even that just passes by.
- Haruki Murakami
But everything changes. To deny change is to deny life. And the present moment contains miracles. Including an ability to see and receive the new.
- Brooke Berman
Hunger and sex still dominate the primitive mammalian side of human existence, but at the present time it looks as if humanity were within sight of their satisfaction. Permanent plenty, no longer a Utopian dream, awaits the arrival of permanent peace.
- John Desmond Bernal
Anticipation of movement, through muscular innervation and memory, by its retention of nerve impulse images, extend the present to the limit of a second or so.
- John Desmond Bernal
The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.
- John Desmond Bernal
But I shall give less thought to the future, I shall work in the present. I feel such work is within my power. For I only succeed in small things, and when I am tried by anxiety, I am bound to say it is the small joys that release me.
- Georges Bernanos
For the sake of "job creation," in Kentucky, and in other backward states, we have lavished public money on corporations that come in and stay only so long as they can exploit people here more cheaply than elsewhere. The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine)
- Wendell Berry
A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy.
(pg. 63, "Racism and the Economy")
- Wendell Berry
To dream the future is much more better than to regret the past.
But the best of all, to live in the present life with all of your power.
- Toba Beta
Memories establish the past;
Senses perceive the present;
Imaginations shape the future.
- Toba Beta
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
- E M Forster
The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
- E M Forster
I live for the present always. I accept this risk. I don't deny the past, but it's a page to turn.
- Juliette Binoche
It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.
- Jim Bishop
It means that the silver coins of the United States at whatever ratio is fixed, and I want the present ratio that we have now, 16 to 1, maintained precisely as it is.
- Richard Parks Bland
You never get quite down to the bottom of the barrel, but we are much higher than that at the present time. There is quite a lot left in the barrel that could be explained by them. If they have some weapons, if they have some anthrax, they should deliver that.
- Hans Blix
The demands of the present must stand above the political habits of the past.
- Matt Blunt
Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into contact, must be considered.
- Franz Boas
I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time.
- Franz Boas
For a long time, my shows were about people walking out or about getting my gigs canceled or having the presenter not wanting to pay me.
- Eric Bogosian
Justification is the means whereby we appropriate the saving act of God in the past, and sanctification the promise of God's activity in the present and future...Justification is primarily concerned with the relation between man and the law of God, sanctification with the Christian's separation from the world until the second coming of Christ...Justification is the new creation of the new man, and sanctification is his preservation until the day of Jesus Christ.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority, and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here, is infringing eternal laws, and taking upon himself superhuman authority, which will eventually crush him.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience.
It isn't more complicated that that.
It is opening to or recieving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is,
without either clinging to it or rejecting it.
- Sylvia Boorstein
If we are to better the future we must disturb the present.
- Catherine Booth
The present grows within the boundaries of the past.
- Simon Van Booy
The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.
- Jorge Luis Borges
One is allowed to change the past: the present is so stubborn.
- Jorge Luis Borges
The future is purchased by the present.
- Samuel Johnson
The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
- Samuel Johnson
There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves
- Ray Bradbury
They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.
- Ray Bradbury
The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
- Alain De Botton
Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention.
- Anthony Bourdain
There's no time like the present to love deeply, claim our power and live our purpose!
- Kristi Bowman
She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.
- Ann Brashares
Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn't change the past. The past was set and sealed.
- Ann Brashares
The present no matter what I brought couldn't change the past. The Past was set and sealed.
- Ann Brashares
How did men believe in something that preached love on one hand, yet taught destruction of unbelievers on the other? How did one rationalize belief with no proof? How could they honestly expect him to have faith in something that taught of miracles and wonders in the far past, but carefully gave excuses for why such things didn't occur in the present day?
- Brandon Sanderson
She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.
- Madeleine L Engle
To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean.
- James H Breasted
We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
- Marshall Mcluhan
The promise given was necessity of the past: the word borken is a necessity of the present -Niccolo Machiavelli
- Michael Scott
[...] nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one's embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one's home.
- Anita Brookner
For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
- John F Kennedy
The future promise of any nation can be directly measured by the present prospects of its youth.
- John F Kennedy
The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.
- John F Kennedy
The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present. The future I have shown you tonight is not yet fixed. But it is more likely to become so with the passing of every day because nothing is being done to turn it aside. If you would change it, do as I have told you.
- Terry Brooks
I began working with the John Muir Institute and then started helping found Friends of the Earth organizations here and there in other countries. That pretty well brings us up to the present.
- David R Brower
Is the minor convenience of allowing the present generation the luxury of doubling its energy consumption every 10 years worth the major hazard of exposing the next 20,000 generations to this lethal waste?
- David R Brower
When we are motivated by compassion and wisdom, the results of our actions benefit everyone, not just our individual selves or some immediate convenience. When we are able to recognize and forgive ignorant actions of the past, we gain strength to constructively solve the problems of the present.
- Dalai Lama
Man surprised me most about humanity.Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
- Dalai Lama
Time passes unhindered. When we make mistakes, we cannot turn the clock back and try again. All we can do is use the present well.
- Dalai Lama
If you are carrying strong feelings about something that happened in your past, they may hinder your ability to live in the present.
- Les Brown
I steeled myself to focus only on the present yet remain alert to what might come next.
- Nicholas Sparks
The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present...yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable.
- Nicholas Sparks
Out of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it, -so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present, condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense.
- Robert Browning
There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
- Anatole Broyard
Living in the present moment means living according to truth and principle (but not according to hard rigid dogma) flexibly applied in the particular way required by the immediate situation in which you are. Such a way of living leaves you free, not ruled tyrannically by imposed regulations which may not at all suit the particular case.
- Paul Brunton
Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us.
- Jean De La Bruyere
Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.
- Jean De La Bruyere
To understand what happens now one must find the cause, which may be very long ago in its beginning, but is surely there, and therefore a knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future.
- Pearl S Buck
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
- Buddha
The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.
- Frederick Buechner
- Mark Twain
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
- Berenice Abbott
Because when you watch U.S. television, all the presenters and reporters, they're all out of central casting.
- Diane Abbott
When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.
- Aberjhani
Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.
- Aberjhani
We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.
- Diane Ackerman
The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have any power over the present. Health and hope grew strong in them, and they were content with each good day as it came, taking pleasure in every meal, and in every word and song.
- J R R Tolkien
So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.
- J R R Tolkien
For a while the hobbits continued to talk and think of the past journey and of the perils that lay ahead; but such was the virtue of the land of Rivendell that soon all fear and anxiety was lifted from their minds. The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have any power over the present. Health and hope grew strong in them, and they were content with each good day as it came, taking pleasure in every meal, and in every word and song.
- J R R Tolkien
Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.
- Douglas Adams
Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present Generation to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.
- John Adams
You may shelve your Shakespearian plans for the present. I am going to play Peter Pan.
- Maude Adams
If it were not for the presents, an elopement would be preferable.
- George Ade
The attainment of the present status of Thailand has to depend on the ability or the actions of all the inhabitants of the country.
- Bhumibol Adulyadej
Since that time up until the present time, there have been progress, and changes all through the time. The changes have not come by themselves; these changes have come from the doings of everyone in the country.
- Bhumibol Adulyadej
Therefore, I think that in the celebration of the 50 years of the present reign, there must be research on the changes that the country has undergone, and in the future, it could be used as a lesson for our future actions.
- Bhumibol Adulyadej
The present is not an instant shared by all space, but an event, i.e. an instant at a place in space.
- Felix Alba Juez
The past and the future are not a collection of instants shared by all space, but a collection of events that correspond to a possible relation of causal order with the present event.
- Felix Alba Juez
Our contradictions. We are in such a hurry to grow up, and then we long for our lost childhood. We make ourselves ill earning money, and then spend all our money on getting well again. We think so much about the future that we neglect the present, and thus experience neither the present nor the future. We live as if we were never going to die, and die as if we had never lived.
- Paulo Coelho
Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment though, is outside of time, it's Eternity. It isn;t what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
You can't measure time the way you measure the distance between two points. "Time" doesn't pass. We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we're always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better, about the consequences of our actions, and about why we didn't act as we should have.
- Paulo Coelho
If you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better.
- Paulo Coelho
The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity. In India they use the word "karma" for lack of any better term. But it's a concept that's rarely given a proper explanation. It isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
Time that never ends, that never passes, that remains in the present, where all of life's secrets lie.
- Paulo Coelho
If you concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man.
- Paulo Coelho
We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; were always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better, about the consequences of our actions, and about why we didn't act as we should have.
- Paulo Coelho
This is the present moment. Learn how to gobble it up without fear or guilt.
- Paulo Coelho
If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man.
- Paulo Coelho
don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in
the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy
man.
- Paulo Coelho
It isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
lived only for the present, because the present was full of surprises.
- Paulo Coelho
I don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we're living now.
- Paulo Coelho
In magic - and in life - there is only the present moment, the now. You can't measure time the way you measure the distance between two points. 'Time' doesn't pass.
- Paulo Coelho
Travelling to past lives is like making a hole in the floor and letting the flames of the fire in the apartment below scorch and burn the present
- Paulo Coelho
Everything which is done in the present, affects the future by consequence, and the past by redemption.
- Paulo Coelho
In life, there is only the present moment, the now. You can't measure time the way you measure distance between two points. "Time" doesn't pass.
- Paulo Coelho
Because I don't live in either my past or my future.I'm interested only in the present.
- Paulo Coelho
That's all anyone has, and it's always brief, although, of course, some people believe they have a past where they can accumulate things and a future where they will accumulate still more. By the way, speaking of the present moment, do you masturbate a lot?
- Paulo Coelho
The secret is here in the present. If you pat attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better, Forget about the future and live each day according to the teachings, confident that God loves his children. Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity.
- Paulo Coelho
Do not concern yourself with what you know or what you do not know. Do not think about the past or the future, merely allow God's hands to write the surprises of the present on each new day.
- Paulo Coelho
I'm alive. When I'm eating that's all I think about. If I'm on the march, I just concentrate on marching. If I have to fight,it will be just as good a day as any to die. If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. Life is the moment we are living now.
- Paulo Coelho
We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use in the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It's always new.
- Paulo Coelho
It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
To envision the future; you must forget the past and make the present a memory
- Jeremy Aldana
I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs.
- Hannes Alfven
If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.
- Dante Alighieri
Memories did one no good, not when one knew the truth in the present
- Cassandra Clare
Memories do one no good, not when one knew the truth in the present.
- Cassandra Clare
There is a reason they call God a presence - because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.
- Elizabeth Gilbert
The great secret about goals and visions is not the future they describe but the change in the present they engender.
- David Allen
The last time I was in Chile, I was hypnotized by a friend who is studying to be a curandero, a healer, who led me back through several incarnations. It wasn't easy to return to the present, however, since my friend hadn't reached that part of the course, but the experiment was well worth the effort because I discovered that in former lives I was not Genghis Khan, as my mother believes.
- Isabel Allende
Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there's not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory.
- Nicole Krauss
In this world, all--men, women, and kings--must live for the present. We can only live for the future for God
- Alexandre Dumas
Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections an idea which carries you back to other times, to other places which, very likely, have no connection with the present time and place.
- Alexandre Dumas
Crazy Horse saw history as integrated in the present, incorporated into daily life.
- Stephen Ambrose
The world has not been in existence from eternity nor could it have been according to the present dispensation and ordering of things.
- William Ames
When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
- Martin Amis
The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present.
- Martin Amis
I don't really think about anything too much. I live in the present. I move on. I don't think about what happened yesterday.
- Pamela Anderson
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.
- Sparky Anderson
I think of the past and the future as well as the present to determine where I am, and I move on while thinking of these things.
- Tadao Ando
Sometimes I think I live more closely to the past than the present.
- Patricia Briggs
The future is keeping you out of the present time.
- Van Morrison
The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present.
- Barbara De Angelis
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
- Maya Angelou
... the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future.
- Hermann Hesse
I do think it's important to live in the present because in that way you won't be living in a state of regret.
- Francesca Annis
The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.
- David Antin
The rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.
- Thomas Jefferson
Peace and abstinence from European interferences are our objects, and so will continue while the present order of things in America remain uninterrupted.
- Thomas Jefferson
If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?
- Thomas Jefferson
The absurd consequences of neglecting structure but using the concept of order just the same are evident if one examines the present terminology of information theory.
- Rudolf Arnheim
I am not sure that digging in our past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them. I have reached a stage at which one hopes to be forgiven for concentrating on how to get through the present.
- Diana Athill
In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred,It is a paryer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present.
- Amelia Atwater Rhodes
Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.
- Margaret Atwood
Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. They dispense no thought with the calculation of risk and profit, they take no thought for the future, they're forced to spearpoint into the present tense. - Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)
- Margaret Atwood
He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.
- Margaret Atwood
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.
- W H Auden
How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.
- Saint Augustine Of Hippo
Confine yourself to the present.
- Marcus Aurelius
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
- Marcus Aurelius
No one can lose either the past or the future - how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess?... It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived: and if this is all he has, he cannot lose what he does not have.
- Marcus Aurelius
Unhappy am I because this has happened to me.- Not so, but happy am I, though this has happened to me, because I continue free from pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearing the future.
- Marcus Aurelius
How she might have felt had there been no Captain Wentworth in the case, was not worth enquiry; for there was a Captain Wentworth: and be the conclusion of the present suspense good or bad, her affection would be his forever. Their union, she believed, could not divide her more from other men, than their final separation.
- Jane Austen
The evils arising from the loss of her uncle were neither trifling nor likely to lessen; and when thought had been freely indulged, in contrasting the past and the present, the employment of mind and dissipation of unpleasant ideas which only reading could produce made her thankfully turn to a book.
- Jane Austen
Are you consulting your own feelings in the present case, or do you imagine that you are gratifying mine?
- Jane Austen
but a sanguine temper, though for ever expecting more good than occurs, does not always pay for its hopes by any proportionate depression. it soon flies over the present failure, and begins to hope again.
- Jane Austen
My dear," replied her husband, "I have two small favours to request. First, that you will allow me the free use of my understanding on the present occasion; and secondly, of my room. I shall be glad to have the library to myself as soon as may be.
- Jane Austen
Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'.
- Paul Auster
What matters is to live in the present, live now, for every moment is now. It is your thoughts and acts of the moment that create your future. The outline of your future path already exists, for you created its pattern by your past.
- Sai Baba
An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.
- Irving Babbitt
Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.
- Lauren Bacall
You stream almost too violently, fountain of delight! And often you empty the cup again, by wanting to fill it!
***
And if a friend does you wrong, then say: "I forgive you what you have done to me; that you have done it to yourself, however-how could I forgive that!"
***
Sex: for free hearts, innocent and free, the garden happiness of the earth, an overflowing of thanks to the present from all the future.
***
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Out of the past come the standards for judging the present; standards in turn to be shaped by the practice of present-day dramatists into broader standards for the next generation.
- George P Baker
I did not know, however, that ancient glories imply, at least in the middle of the present century, present fatigue and, quite probably, paranoia; that there is a limit to the role of intelligence in human affairs; and that no people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
- James Baldwin
It is a mistake, too, to say that the face is the mirror of the soul. The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair.
- Oscar Wilde
Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day.
- Muriel Barbery
..if you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don't you see?
- Muriel Barbery
...we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity.
That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.
- Muriel Barbery
I tried to put the displacement between parenthesis, to put a last period in a long sentence of the sadness of history, personal and public history. But I see nothing except commas. I want to sew the times together. I want to attach one moment to another, to attach childhood to age, to attach the present to the absent and all the presents to all absences, to attach exiles to the homeland and to attach what I have imagined to what I see now.
- Mourid Barghouti
If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.
- Julian Barnes
I haven't fought with anyone else in over two thousand years. (Kyrian)
Well, you're never too old to learn. (Amanda)
You can't teach an old dog new tricks. (Kyrian)
There's no time like the present. (Amanda)
Time is of the essence. (Kyrian)
God helps those who help themselves. (Amanda)
You're not going to let me win this, are you? (Kyrian)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
I am old enough to know that time passing is just a trick, a convenience. Everything is always there, still unfolding, still happening. The past, the present, and the future, in the noggin eternally, like brushes, combs and ribbons in a handbag.
- Sebastian Barry
Under the present conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its function, to gift-giving, to squandering without reciprocation.
- Georges Bataille
We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future.
- Gregory Bateson
The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.
- Charles Baudelaire
In February, the overcast sky isn't gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It's a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you're inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely.
- Charles Baxter
The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future.
Cut loose the past; it is dead weight.
Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.
- Stephen Baxter
Mindfulness allows you to face the past with courage, whether it is scarred with pain or caressed with joy, and it gently holds you in the safe haven of the present without allowing you to become overwhelmed with what may or may not be waiting in the future.
- Deborah A Beasley
One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.
- Simone De Beauvoir
The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.
- Simone De Beauvoir
Accordingly, globalization is not only something that will concern and threaten us in the future, but something that is taking place in the present and to which we must first open our eyes.
- Ulrich Beck
There is a foundation for our lives, a place in which our life rests. That place is nothing but the present moment, as we see, hear, experience what is. If we do not return to that place, we live our lives out of our heads. We blame others; we complain; we feel sorry for ourselves. All of these symptoms show that we're stuck in our thoughts. We're out of touch with the open space that is always right here.
- Charlotte Joko Beck
The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.
- Blaise Pascal
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
- Blaise Pascal
Our imagination so magnifies the present, because we are continually thinking about it, and so reduces eternity, because we do not think about it, that we turn eternity into nothing and nothing into eternity, and all this is so strongly rooted within us that all our reason cannot save us from it.
- Blaise Pascal
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
- Albert Camus
The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.
- Albert Camus
Well, Mr. Antichrist, that's all for the present!
- Albert Camus
I am going to produce a movie of my own. I am not going to stick to the time-tested formulae of Hindi cinema. I want to make a film for the present generation. So there will be a lot of new faces in the film.
- Kabir Bedi
Anne looked at the white young mother with a certain awe that had never entered into her feelings for Diana before. Could this pale woman with the rapture in her eyes be the little black-curled, rosy-cheeked Diana she had played with in vanished schooldays? It gave her a queer desolate feeling that she herself somehow belonged only in those past years and had no business in the present at all.
- L M Montgomery
Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day.
- Saul Bellow
The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.
- Peter Benchley
You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.
- John Steinbeck
Eternal Life is life itself, real life, which can also be lived in the present age and is no longer challenged by physical death.
- Pope Benedict Xvi
Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.
- Ruth Benedict
To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present.
- Bo Bennett
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
- John Berger
Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
- John Berger
Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.
- Franklin D Roosevelt
It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.
- Franklin D Roosevelt
In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.
- Henri Bergson
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
- Henri Bergson
What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.
- Haruki Murakami
The past and the present, might we say, go like this. The future is a maybe. Yet we look back on the darkness that obscures the path that brought us fair, we only come up with another indefinite maybe. The only thing we perceive with any clarity is the present moment, and even that just passes by.
- Haruki Murakami
But everything changes. To deny change is to deny life. And the present moment contains miracles. Including an ability to see and receive the new.
- Brooke Berman
Hunger and sex still dominate the primitive mammalian side of human existence, but at the present time it looks as if humanity were within sight of their satisfaction. Permanent plenty, no longer a Utopian dream, awaits the arrival of permanent peace.
- John Desmond Bernal
Anticipation of movement, through muscular innervation and memory, by its retention of nerve impulse images, extend the present to the limit of a second or so.
- John Desmond Bernal
The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.
- John Desmond Bernal
But I shall give less thought to the future, I shall work in the present. I feel such work is within my power. For I only succeed in small things, and when I am tried by anxiety, I am bound to say it is the small joys that release me.
- Georges Bernanos
For the sake of "job creation," in Kentucky, and in other backward states, we have lavished public money on corporations that come in and stay only so long as they can exploit people here more cheaply than elsewhere. The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine)
- Wendell Berry
A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy.
(pg. 63, "Racism and the Economy")
- Wendell Berry
To dream the future is much more better than to regret the past.
But the best of all, to live in the present life with all of your power.
- Toba Beta
Memories establish the past;
Senses perceive the present;
Imaginations shape the future.
- Toba Beta
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
- E M Forster
The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
- E M Forster
I live for the present always. I accept this risk. I don't deny the past, but it's a page to turn.
- Juliette Binoche
It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.
- Jim Bishop
It means that the silver coins of the United States at whatever ratio is fixed, and I want the present ratio that we have now, 16 to 1, maintained precisely as it is.
- Richard Parks Bland
You never get quite down to the bottom of the barrel, but we are much higher than that at the present time. There is quite a lot left in the barrel that could be explained by them. If they have some weapons, if they have some anthrax, they should deliver that.
- Hans Blix
The demands of the present must stand above the political habits of the past.
- Matt Blunt
Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into contact, must be considered.
- Franz Boas
I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time.
- Franz Boas
For a long time, my shows were about people walking out or about getting my gigs canceled or having the presenter not wanting to pay me.
- Eric Bogosian
Justification is the means whereby we appropriate the saving act of God in the past, and sanctification the promise of God's activity in the present and future...Justification is primarily concerned with the relation between man and the law of God, sanctification with the Christian's separation from the world until the second coming of Christ...Justification is the new creation of the new man, and sanctification is his preservation until the day of Jesus Christ.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority, and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here, is infringing eternal laws, and taking upon himself superhuman authority, which will eventually crush him.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience.
It isn't more complicated that that.
It is opening to or recieving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is,
without either clinging to it or rejecting it.
- Sylvia Boorstein
If we are to better the future we must disturb the present.
- Catherine Booth
The present grows within the boundaries of the past.
- Simon Van Booy
The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.
- Jorge Luis Borges
One is allowed to change the past: the present is so stubborn.
- Jorge Luis Borges
The future is purchased by the present.
- Samuel Johnson
The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
- Samuel Johnson
There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves
- Ray Bradbury
They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.
- Ray Bradbury
The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
- Alain De Botton
Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention.
- Anthony Bourdain
There's no time like the present to love deeply, claim our power and live our purpose!
- Kristi Bowman
She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.
- Ann Brashares
Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn't change the past. The past was set and sealed.
- Ann Brashares
The present no matter what I brought couldn't change the past. The Past was set and sealed.
- Ann Brashares
How did men believe in something that preached love on one hand, yet taught destruction of unbelievers on the other? How did one rationalize belief with no proof? How could they honestly expect him to have faith in something that taught of miracles and wonders in the far past, but carefully gave excuses for why such things didn't occur in the present day?
- Brandon Sanderson
She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.
- Madeleine L Engle
To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean.
- James H Breasted
We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
- Marshall Mcluhan
The promise given was necessity of the past: the word borken is a necessity of the present -Niccolo Machiavelli
- Michael Scott
[...] nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one's embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one's home.
- Anita Brookner
For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
- John F Kennedy
The future promise of any nation can be directly measured by the present prospects of its youth.
- John F Kennedy
The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.
- John F Kennedy
The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present. The future I have shown you tonight is not yet fixed. But it is more likely to become so with the passing of every day because nothing is being done to turn it aside. If you would change it, do as I have told you.
- Terry Brooks
I began working with the John Muir Institute and then started helping found Friends of the Earth organizations here and there in other countries. That pretty well brings us up to the present.
- David R Brower
Is the minor convenience of allowing the present generation the luxury of doubling its energy consumption every 10 years worth the major hazard of exposing the next 20,000 generations to this lethal waste?
- David R Brower
When we are motivated by compassion and wisdom, the results of our actions benefit everyone, not just our individual selves or some immediate convenience. When we are able to recognize and forgive ignorant actions of the past, we gain strength to constructively solve the problems of the present.
- Dalai Lama
Man surprised me most about humanity.Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
- Dalai Lama
Time passes unhindered. When we make mistakes, we cannot turn the clock back and try again. All we can do is use the present well.
- Dalai Lama
If you are carrying strong feelings about something that happened in your past, they may hinder your ability to live in the present.
- Les Brown
I steeled myself to focus only on the present yet remain alert to what might come next.
- Nicholas Sparks
The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present...yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable.
- Nicholas Sparks
Out of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it, -so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present, condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense.
- Robert Browning
There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
- Anatole Broyard
Living in the present moment means living according to truth and principle (but not according to hard rigid dogma) flexibly applied in the particular way required by the immediate situation in which you are. Such a way of living leaves you free, not ruled tyrannically by imposed regulations which may not at all suit the particular case.
- Paul Brunton
Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us.
- Jean De La Bruyere
Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.
- Jean De La Bruyere
To understand what happens now one must find the cause, which may be very long ago in its beginning, but is surely there, and therefore a knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future.
- Pearl S Buck
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
- Buddha
The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.
- Frederick Buechner
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