Present Quotes
More Present Quotes
Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present.
Jim Rohn
True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca— Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist (4 BC - 65 AD)
The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple. Everything is where it is, no clearer than usual, but certainly more present. So much has to be left behind now, so quickly.
thomas pynchon— Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present: fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.
C. S. Lewis— The Screwtape Letters, no. 15 (1942).
Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure.
Oprah Winfrey— American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist
Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
C. S. Lewis— The Screwtape Letters, Letter XVI (1942)
How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.
Edmund White— A Boy's Own Story, Chapter Six (p. 170)
If you are living in the past or in the future , you will never find a meaning in the present.
Fausto Cercignani— In: Brian Morris, Simply Transcribed. Quotations from Fausto Cercignani, (2013), p. 9.
The present is an infinitesimal between two infinites. 'Tis a line (a thing without breadth or thickness) moving across the surface of Eternity . The present is no more, by the time you have said, This is present.
— Henry Harland, The Lady Paramount (1902), Ch. VII.
The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present.
Abraham Lincoln— Annual Message to Congress (1 December 1862)
There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future.
kim stanley robinson— Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream (2009), Ch. 13, p. 282.
Truth is beyond space and time. One who does not yearn for truth, will be trapped within space and time and become dogged. That man alone can remain free from mulish tendencies, who has the capacity to think across time: in the past, present and the future.
Mahāprajña— Thoughts at Sunrise (2007)
The Now , that indivisible point which studs the length of infinite line Whose ends are nowhere, is thine all , the puny all thou callest thine.
sir richard francis burton— In The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870), IX
