quotations about the present
Tomorrows were full of awful things. Today, now, was the essential.
ARIANA FRANKLIN
Mistress of the Art of Death
The present is our only life.
ABI USRIN
attributed, Day's Collacon
In basketball -- as in life -- true joy comes from being fully present in each and every moment, not just when things are going your way.
PHIL JACKSON
Sacred Hoops
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
GEORGE ORWELL
Nineteen Eighty-Four
In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.
ALAN MOORE
Watchmen
The days of life are consumed, one by one, without an object beyond the present moment; ever flying from the ennui of that, yet carrying it with us; eternally in pursuit of happiness, which keeps eternally before us. If death or bankruptcy happen to trip us out of the circle, it is matter for the buzz of the evening, and is completely forgotten by the next morning.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Mrs. Bingham, February 7, 1787
The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Pickman's Model"
Be reverent towards each day. Love it, respect it, do not sully it, do not hinder it from coming to flower.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Jean-Christophe
With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand ... hopeless from the start.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
The future and the past are equally meaningless because they are nebulous entities, times that do not exist, containing events which have no echo because they are gone, or which hold no import because they are yet to happen. What is important is the here and now, and now, and now, and the spaces between the nows.
TIM LEBBON
Face
The present is a beautiful medium to knit every bond closer, and to make every dear remembrance still more precious.
FRIEDRICH DANIEL ERNST SCHLEIERMACHER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.
KARL MARX
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
But we look ahead to the far off skies,
For the years are flying fast,
And we know that the present that round us lies
Ere the light of a few more moments dies,
Will with many loved and severed ties
Fade into the mist-veiled past.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"The Beautiful Past"
Enjoy the present, whatsoever it be, and be not solicitous about the future.
JEREMY TAYLOR
attributed, Day's Collacon
I don't want a future, I want a present. To me this appears of greater value. You have a future only when you have no present, and when you have a present, you forget to even think about the future.
ROBERT WALSER
The Tanners
Live in the present, remember the past, and fear not the future, for it doesn't exist and never shall. There is only now.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Eldest
The shadow by my finger cast
Divides the future from the past:
Before it, sleeps the unborn hour,
In darkness, and beyond thy power:
Behind its unreturning line,
The vanished hour, no longer thine:
One hour alone is in thy hands--
The NOW on which the shadow stands.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"The Sun-Dial at Wells College"
The present is pregnant with the future.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
Philosophical Writings
We might realize that the present moment may be one of an eternal or sempiternal series of moments, all of which will resemble it because, in some ways, they are the present, and won't in other ways, because the present will be the past by that time.
JOHN ASHBERY
The Paris Review, winter 1983