the present Quotes

“I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.”

“Still, to my mind he overdid it, and I’d have liked to have a chance of explaining to him, in a quite friendly, almost affectionate way, that I have never been able really to regret anything in all my life. I’ve always been far too much absorbed in the present moment, or the immediate future, to think back.”

“The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. ”

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.

“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time.”

“I pray for faith that my future will be good if I live today well, and in peace. I will remember that staying in the present is the best thing I can do for my future. I will focus on what’s happening now instead of what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

“... the psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.”

“Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.”

“Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.”

“There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain - this is what I want to talk about now.”

“Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.”

“Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are cause by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”

“The doors to the world of the wild are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”

“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.”

“Live in the present, make the most of it, it’s all you’ve got.”

“Mindfulness is the best way to be with our suffering without being overwhelmed by it. Mindfulness is the capacity to dwell in the present moment, to know what’s happening in the here and now.”

“When I find myself focusing overmuch on the anticipated future happiness of arriving at a certain goal, I remind myself to ‘Enjoy now’. If I can enjoy the present, I don’t need to count on the happiness that is (or isn’t) waiting for me in the future”.”

“There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”

“The French have a song they like to sing, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’on attend pour etre heureux?” (What are you waiting for in order to be happy?) You can be happy right here and right 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.”

“I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.”

“Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars.”

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

“The past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.”

“There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”

“You are very good. But it strikes me that there is a want of harmony between your present mood of self-sacrifice and your past mood of self-preservation.”

“Thus the differences between the conservative and the radical seem to spring mainly from their attitude toward the future. Fear of the future causes us to lean against and cling to the present, while faith in the future renders us receptive to change.”

“But in the meantime, you got to remember, you can’t always judge people by the things they done. You got to judge them by what they are doing now.”

“Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment. Mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them - without believing, for instance, that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment. When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune in to what we’re sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future.”

“Remember this also: it’s always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.”

“Some towns … want to talk about what happened, about the past. Other towns, discussion of the past is discouraged. We went to a place once where the children didn’t know the world had ever been different, although you’d think all the rusted-out automobiles and telephones wires would give them a clue.”

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”

“We will never know peace if we lose the present because we are trapped in the past and paralyzed by the future.”

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

“His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before.”

“Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.”

“Today may be the enemy of your tomorrow. In your business and perhaps your life, the tomorrow that you desire and envision may never come to pass if you do not end some things you are doing today.”

“Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.”

“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.”

“But if you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass.”

“Time will mellow it, make it a moment for laughter. But now it was not funny, now I did not laugh. It was not the future, it was the present. It was too vivid and too real.”

“Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.”

“The past and the present are within my field of inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.”

The best way to say, “Thank you, God,” is by letting go of the past and living in the present moment, right here and now.

″(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.)”

“My counsel to you is to make sure your mirror is set so that you can see the past without allowing it to distract you from the present.”

“The great secret about goals and visions is not the future they describe but the change in the present they engender.”

“Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment.”

“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”

“Let us leave theories there and return to here’s hear.”

“I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.”

“Always, he wonders why and how he has let four months—months increasingly distant from him—so affect him, so alter his life. But then, he might as well ask—as he often does—why he has let the first fifteen years of his life so dictate the past twenty-eight. He has been lucky beyond measure; he has an adulthood that people dream about: Why, then, does he insist on revisiting and replaying events that happened so long ago? Why can he not simply take pleasure in his present? Why must he so honor his past? Why does it become more vivid, not less, the further he moves from it?”

“She thought to herself, ‘This is now.’ She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”

“Our Koro was like an old whale stranded in an alien present, but that was how it was supposed to be, because he also had his role in the pattern of things, in the tides of the future”

“The past is over and done. We cannot change that now. Yet we can change our thoughts about the past. How foolish for us to PUNISH OURSELVES in the present moment because someone hurt us in the long-ago past.”

“The present hadn’t changed—but those two people had. Both Kohtake and Hirai returned to the present with a changed heart.”

“When you go back, no matter how hard you try, the present won’t change.”

“All you need are these: certainty of judgement in the present moment: action for the common good in the present moment; and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way.”

″...there has to be a real reason to love the past. Not just that you can’t accept the present, or can’t live in it.”

“Something darkened in me because I saw that dad was shattered. I didn’t want a shattered father. I want him whole, present, affectionate, loving. I still want that.”

“This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently.”

“Each patient demands that we suspend our sense of what is normal and accept that we are dealing with a dual reality: the reality of a relatively secure and predictable present that lives side by side with a ruinous, ever-present past.”

“He knew them like I knew them. Passed to him. Passed them to his little brother. Passed to my older brother. Passed to me. The Rules have always ruled. Past present future forever.”

“Everything that happened this past summer, and every summer before it, has all led up to this. To now.”

“It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.”

“I listen to these people I don’t know use the past tense about my mother, the person who brought me into this world and created my present. They are past-tensing my heart...”

“Love blinds. We have both tried to give our sons, not what they needed, but what we needed. We’ve been so busy trying to rewrite our own pasts, we’ve blighted their present.”