present

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
e0049ff	Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.	attributed-no-source widely-misattributed present past hope inspirational misattributed-eleanor-roosevelt	Bill Keane
f65764f	Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.	present future	Albert Camus
f9b4532	You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.	present past life labyrinth	John Green
9ade0a1	Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.	attributed present unsourced life inspirational	Thich Nhat Hanh
6e0e4f0	Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.	present gratitude future past love	C.S. Lewis
589f6f2	For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.	present time	C.S. Lewis
59bab82	You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.	present depression future cognition issues troubles judgment	Andrew Solomon
c9f7aa4	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. 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. Or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do tomorrow, what precautions we should take, what dangers await us around the next corner, how to avoid what we don't want and how to get what we have always dreamed of.	present time past life living-in-the-moment	Paulo Coelho
1bf4dfa	The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.	present future past	C.S. Lewis
3760cc0	Stop longing. You poison today's ease, reaching always for tomorrow.	present philosophy today tomorrow poison longing	Robin Hobb
85f1f92	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.	present past	Nicholas Sparks
14ec3d2	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.	present future past	St. Augustine of Hippo
b6c063e	But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until -- later of sooner -- perhaps -- no, not perhaps -- quite certainly: it will come.	present time past	Christopher Isherwood
04186b2	Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home.	present sleep life waking-up	Christopher Isherwood
2c0b2a5	There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can't, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.	present past	Terry Pratchett
bdb5b63	But now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.	present life dark-bird	Audrey Niffenegger
73c7653	A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.	present marjorie-bruce robert-the-bruce worn cage historical-fiction old girl young-adult-fiction	Jane Yolen
a45df20	"I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?" She studied him, her eyes grave. "Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present."	present past stephen-king doctor-sleep	Stephen King
5dd466c	Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.	present weight	Nathaniel Hawthorne
6b7a76b	"Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now. For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time. Well, I have lived most of my life; I can be robbed of only a few more years. But it seems too bad - this universal craving to escape what could be a rich, productive, happy world. We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask. Why in the world can't we have it? ("I'm Scared")"	present past escapist escapism modernity nostalgia	Jack Finney
57260e1	We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.	present thoughts past life	Kurt Vonnegut
2ecf315	The past is no further away than the last breath you took.	present	Robin Hobb
e232093	The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.	present time past	Jeanette Winterson
550656f	If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being--ever mindful of its personal style.	present time history future past mainstream new-orleans conformity timelessness	Tom Robbins
525954c	It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.	present past	Frank Herbert
a888725	Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.	present time literature past tense	John Green
6e2e82d	History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past	present history future past mystification	John Berger
c887ae5	"I got you a present." "Did you?" "It's a book of poetry--romancy stuff. I thought, 'How schmaltzy is that,' so it seemed like the thing. Then I screwed up and left it in my desk at work"	present roarke	J.D. Robb
1cb372b	... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.	present time history warning future past truth depository lesseon rival example witness	Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
309d56c	"Forget your voice, sing! Forget your feet, dance!	lover present dance live spirituality music song spiritual life love inspirational sing awareness-quotes be become let-go conscious consciousness-quotes consciousness feet enjoy yourself khayyam harmony letting-go-quotes living-in-the-now moment saadi kamand kamand-kojouri kojouri sufi rumi hafiz hafez awareness surrender forget voice beloved	Kamand Kojouri
b1d56e9	Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.	present	Chuck Palahniuk
f7b16ce	The choices we're working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can't know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it's all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.	present universe future free-will past god life choices	Audrey Niffenegger
3925e0a	There's been terrible things we seen, en't there? And more a coming, more'n likely. So I think I'd rather not know what's in the future. I'll stick to the present.	present future philosophy	Philip Pullman
72112e4	Sometimes, I think one should only live in the present. The past is only a heavy burden to carry with you. And yet... it's so hard to let them go... to forget... to move ahead...	present past moving-on-and-letting-go	Danielle Steel
6f00c47	What is our life: (Pause.) it's looking forward or it's looking back. And that's our life. That's it. Where is the moment?	present past life moment	David Mamet
988eddb	Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.	present time humanity past epistemology trees	George R.R. Martin
d716b0d	The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.	present heaven present-moment forever existentialism paradise	Franz Kafka
581d8c7	Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.	present life lack purpose	John le Carré
01242d2	Neither mine nor other people's prospects seem particularly pleasing just at the moment, and I have fantasies of going to Iceland, never to return. As it is, I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.	present past iceland	Edward Gorey
000b98b	"As I write this, we are in an especially divisive era in American politics. There are questions about who holds power, who abuses it, who profits from it, and at what cost to our democracy. It is a time of questions about what makes us American, of shifting identities, inclusion and exclusion, protest, civil and human rights, the strength of our compassion versus the weakness of our fears, and the seductive lure of a mythic "great" past that never was versus the need for the consciousness and responsibility necessary if we are truly to live up to the rich promise of "We the People." We are a country built by immigrants, dreams, daring, and opportunity. We are a country built by the horrors of slavery and genocide, the injustice of racism and exclusion. These realities exist side by side. It is our past and present. The future is unwritten. This is a book about ghosts. For we live in a haunted house."	present future past inspirational-quote americans	Libba Bray
d15de03	If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.	present past	Julian Barnes
c715192	Information about time cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs must be unscrewed and whose drawers must be removed before, in an altered state, it can be upended into the entryway of our minds, then the future is a king-size waterbed that hardly stands a chance, especially if it needs to be brought up in an elevator. Those billions who persist in perceiving time as the pursuit of the future are continually buying waterbeds that will never make it beyond the front porch or the lobby. And if man's mission is to reside in the fullness of the present, then he's got no space for the waterbed, anyhow, not even if he could lower it through a skylight.	present time past	Tom Robbins
3d36be7	"Have you noticed," she asked him, "how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?"	present past	Mary Balogh
bd645d2	There are things that once done can't be undone, things that once said can't be unsaid.	present past life reverse said the-neighbor undone mistakes	Lisa Gardner
f85bd10	At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past.	present past	Haruki Murakami
1760484	the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance.	present past	Jeanette Winterson
a97baf4	"YOU HAVE TO BE STRONG ENOUGH TO BE WEAK Allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling. Notice any labels you attach to crying or feeling vulnerable. Let go of the labels. Just feel what you are feeling, all the while cultivating moment-to-moment awareness, riding the waves of "up" and "down," "good" and "bad," "weak" and "strong," until you see that they are all inadequate to fully describe your experience. Be with the experience itself. Trust in your deepest strength of all: to be present, to be wakeful."	present labels weak trust strength moment-to-moment-awareness riding-the-waves up-and-down wakeful weak-and-strong good-and-bad feeling mindfulness meditation experience strong vulnerable	Jon Kabat-Zinn
9cca028	In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.	present suicide young-adult youth future imagination beath decision teenager burden childhood dying	Rebecca Solnit
0ae7433	Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it -- fragmentary and uncertain though it is -- that distinguishes man from all other animals	present human-being reality past	Colin Wilson
739196e	Are we truly obeying the command to love our neighbor as ourselves if we're storing up money for potential future needs when our neighbor is laboring today under actual present needs?	current present future compassion love hoarding stewardship labor sharing selfish neighbor saving need justice	Randy Alcorn
0a6fd04	Memory is the enemy of wonder	present wonder memory	Michael Pollan
28f6785	When I save, I lay something aside for future need. If I sense God's leading, I will give it away to meet greater needs. When I hoard, I'm unwilling to part with what I've saved to meet others' needs, because my possible future needs outweigh their actual present needs. I fail to love my neighbor as myself.	present future compassion hoarding stewardship needs sharing saving protection	Randy Alcorn
c2c626b	Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.	present history past happiness	Hermann Hesse
9081e7c	Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.	present past mindfulness	Henry David Thoreau
aaed596	The only thing that makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture.	present torture	Chuck Palahniuk
10be694	"That part of your life is over. Set it aside as something you have finished. Complete or no, it is done with you. No being gets to decide what his life is "supposed to be"...'Be a man. Discover where you are now, and go on from there, making the best of things. Accept your life, and you might survive it. If you hold back from it, insisting this is not your life, not where you are meant to be, life will pass you by. You may not die from such foolishness, but you might as well be dead for all the good your life will do you or anyone else."	present fate good future honesty past destiny life truth aside complete forgo meant not part section set survive to decide done finish discover over end path be forget dead	Robin Hobb
5a06f34	When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.	present time music now time-passing present-moment	Ruth Ozeki
77d2b56	In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.	present memories past west promises	Wade Davis
b930e43	Do you know that I love now to recall and visit at certain dates the places where I was once happy in my own way? I love to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past...	present	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
b8619b0	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?	present now	Paulo Coelho
1ff7150	Future indifferences is no consolation for present pain.	present pain	Mary Balogh
c0ac46a	We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...] My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.	present time history past family life build-up chronology development generation-gap existentialism modernity	Wallace Stegner
066ccbc	The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present.	present history past	Shashi Tharoor
205f59e	Every hour, stop and ask: Am I really present in this moment? If not, what are my thoughts focused on? Doing this often will help you return to the present moment.	present thoughts present-moment return moment	Azim Jamal & Brian Tracy
7050a12	Of an artistic temperament, I deny that I am; yet I must possess something of the artist's faculty of making the most of present pleasure.	present temperament pleasure	Charlotte Brontë
50c2cc0	[T]he concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine. ... Thought and deed conjoined are crucial. ... The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; successs or failure is secondary.	mankind present future success philosophy purification deeds souls goals divinity failure thought	Iain Pears
01a4e9a	If we know the past, and live the present, it is possible that we dream the future?	present past	Truman Capote
ef3bf14	"The Future," says Ian, in a film-trailer voice. "Coming soon, to a Present near you."	present future	David Mitchell
0064694	In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.	present walden thoreau	Henry David Thoreau
17e41ab	Our past thinking has determined our present status, and our present thinking will determine our future status; for man is what man thinks.	present thoughts past thinking	C.G. Jung
b110c7a	If you would understand the present, you must come to know the past.	present understanding understand	Libba Bray
71b98ee	while she wanted to look neither to her past nor her future, she lived exclusively in both. They had took different paths, but they had journeyed, so she realized, together.	present future past life thoughts-on-life thought-provoking	Monica Ali
d713e2c	When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it's happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting. [...] We die without knowing what we have lived.	present time memory	Milan Kundera
86b39fd	Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them.	present past the-west regret	Cormac McCarthy
05cd189	"I also came to see that I should not worry about tomorrow, next week, next year, or next century. The more willing I was to look honestly at what I was thinking and saying and doing now, the more easily I would come into touch with the movement of God's Spirit in me, leading me to the future. God is a God of the present and reveals to those who are willing to listen carefully to the moment in which they live the steps they are to take toward the future. "Do not worry about tomorrow," Jesus says, "tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own" (Matthew 6:34)."	present god-of-the-present holy-spirit today tomorrow revelation	Henri J.M. Nouwen
65e69ac	There's so much to write. Where should I start? I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote me back this: 'You should start where you are	present individuality inspirational startup perspective creativity	Ruth Ozeki
796bd68	He ought to let the past keep its glow and not try to mix it with what he had in the present.	present time past past-and-present	Larry McMurtry
50565b2	It was strange how the future seemed tied inseparably to the past, so that both revolved through the present, like a great wheel...	present past	Tad Williams
c243f3a	I would have no need for the Memory Of Things past if those which were Present were more agreeable	present past	Peter Ackroyd
76a5921	"I'll let you in on a little secret, Garry: everything is history. By the time you notice it, it's already happened. That famous imposter, "the present," disappears in the cognitive gap. Mind the gap!"	present history past	Edward St. Aubyn
53c0e6a	Faculty X is the ability to grasp the reality not simply of other times and places, but of the present moment as well.	present reality x places	Colin Wilson
93fbd3c	"Maybe a holiday miracle will change Mearth's awful behavior," Mandy suggested with optimism. "The only holiday miracle around here is that Mearth hasn't murdered us both yet," said Alecto, lighting another cigarette, his hands shaking erratically. He looked exhausted and terrified, his gray eyes soulless. "Do you know what Mearth likes, Alecto?" Mandy questioned. "Vegetables, she likes celery a lot, and lettuce," Alecto responded in a quiet monotone. "I don't know what else she likes. I've never asked her." "Well, she has to like something... doesn't everyone?" "Not her, Mandy Valems."	present miracle murder humor going-green hoiday lettuce mother-earth comedy cigarette christmas vegetables gift	Rebecca McNutt
3d9957c	Diuen que cada floc de neu es diferent. Si aixo fos cert, com podria el mon anar endavant? Com podriem aixecar-nos de les nostres genuflexions? Com podriem recuperar-nos d'una meravella aixi? Oblidant. No podem tenir massa coses al cap. Nomes existeix el present i no hi ha res per a recordar.	present uniqueness	Jeanette Winterson
ea67b8a	I bought this the day before at a shopping mall. I didn't want to forget him. Maybe I didn't want him to forget me.	present parting gift remember	Mitch Albom
4308aef	Live in the present. Tomorrow is a puzzle you can only solve with the answers you find today.	present life-lessons live-in-the-present	Sean Patrick Brennan
d8d613a	The present looks back at some great figure of an earlier century and wonders, Was he on our side? Was he a goodie? What a lack of self-confidence this implies: the present wants both to patronise the past by adjudicating on its political acceptability, and also to be flattered by it, to be patted on the back and told to keep up the good work.	present self-confidence	Julian Barnes
bc02838	The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or sorrow or wonder than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.	present time past now	Richard Flanagan
a4b9013	How we present ourselves at any given time is dependent on the situation. We constantly balance the tension of high aspirations with the pragmatism of realistic expectations. The key is to represent ourselves in such a way that we can fulfill the expectations we create.	present high-aspirations matter-more pragmatic realistic-expectations realistic relevance tension	Marian Deegan
2f2a032	The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.	present time history past reflection introspection memory	Iris Murdoch

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.

attributed-no-source widely-misattributed present past hope inspirational misattributed-eleanor-roosevelt

Bill Keane

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Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.

present future

Albert Camus

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You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

present past life labyrinth

John Green

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Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.

attributed present unsourced life inspirational

Thich Nhat Hanh

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Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

present gratitude future past love

C.S. Lewis

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For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.

present time

C.S. Lewis

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You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.

present depression future cognition issues troubles judgment

Andrew Solomon

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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. 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. Or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do tomorrow, what precautions we should take, what dangers await us around the next corner, how to avoid what we don't want and how to get what we have always dreamed of.

present time past life living-in-the-moment

Paulo Coelho

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The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.

present future past

C.S. Lewis

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Stop longing. You poison today's ease, reaching always for tomorrow.

present philosophy today tomorrow poison longing

Robin Hobb

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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.

present past

Nicholas Sparks

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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.

present future past

St. Augustine of Hippo

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But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until -- later of sooner -- perhaps -- no, not perhaps -- quite certainly: it will come.

present time past

Christopher Isherwood

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Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home.

present sleep life waking-up

Christopher Isherwood

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There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can't, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.

present past

Terry Pratchett

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But now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.

present life dark-bird

Audrey Niffenegger

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A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.

present marjorie-bruce robert-the-bruce worn cage historical-fiction old girl young-adult-fiction

Jane Yolen

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"I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?" She studied him, her eyes grave. "Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present."

present past stephen-king doctor-sleep

Stephen King

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Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.

present weight

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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"Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now. For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time. Well, I have lived most of my life; I can be robbed of only a few more years. But it seems too bad - this universal craving to escape what could be a rich, productive, happy world. We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask. Why in the world can't we have it? ("I'm Scared")"

present past escapist escapism modernity nostalgia

Jack Finney

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We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

present thoughts past life

Kurt Vonnegut

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The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

present

Robin Hobb

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The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

present time past

Jeanette Winterson

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If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being--ever mindful of its personal style.

present time history future past mainstream new-orleans conformity timelessness

Tom Robbins

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

present past

Frank Herbert

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Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.

present time literature past tense

John Green

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History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

present history future past mystification

John Berger

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"I got you a present." "Did you?" "It's a book of poetry--romancy stuff. I thought, 'How schmaltzy is that,' so it seemed like the thing. Then I screwed up and left it in my desk at work"

present roarke

J.D. Robb

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... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.

present time history warning future past truth depository lesseon rival example witness

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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"Forget your voice, sing! Forget your feet, dance!

lover present dance live spirituality music song spiritual life love inspirational sing awareness-quotes be become let-go conscious consciousness-quotes consciousness feet enjoy yourself khayyam harmony letting-go-quotes living-in-the-now moment saadi kamand kamand-kojouri kojouri sufi rumi hafiz hafez awareness surrender forget voice beloved

Kamand Kojouri

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Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.

present

Chuck Palahniuk

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The choices we're working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can't know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it's all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.

present universe future free-will past god life choices

Audrey Niffenegger

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There's been terrible things we seen, en't there? And more a coming, more'n likely. So I think I'd rather not know what's in the future. I'll stick to the present.

present future philosophy

Philip Pullman

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Sometimes, I think one should only live in the present. The past is only a heavy burden to carry with you. And yet... it's so hard to let them go... to forget... to move ahead...

present past moving-on-and-letting-go

Danielle Steel

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What is our life: (Pause.) it's looking forward or it's looking back. And that's our life. That's it. Where is the moment?

present past life moment

David Mamet

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Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.

present time humanity past epistemology trees

George R.R. Martin

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The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.

present heaven present-moment forever existentialism paradise

Franz Kafka

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Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.

present life lack purpose

John le Carré

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Neither mine nor other people's prospects seem particularly pleasing just at the moment, and I have fantasies of going to Iceland, never to return. As it is, I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.

present past iceland

Edward Gorey

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"As I write this, we are in an especially divisive era in American politics. There are questions about who holds power, who abuses it, who profits from it, and at what cost to our democracy. It is a time of questions about what makes us American, of shifting identities, inclusion and exclusion, protest, civil and human rights, the strength of our compassion versus the weakness of our fears, and the seductive lure of a mythic "great" past that never was versus the need for the consciousness and responsibility necessary if we are truly to live up to the rich promise of "We the People." We are a country built by immigrants, dreams, daring, and opportunity. We are a country built by the horrors of slavery and genocide, the injustice of racism and exclusion. These realities exist side by side. It is our past and present. The future is unwritten. This is a book about ghosts. For we live in a haunted house."

present future past inspirational-quote americans

Libba Bray

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If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.

present past

Julian Barnes

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Information about time cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs must be unscrewed and whose drawers must be removed before, in an altered state, it can be upended into the entryway of our minds, then the future is a king-size waterbed that hardly stands a chance, especially if it needs to be brought up in an elevator. Those billions who persist in perceiving time as the pursuit of the future are continually buying waterbeds that will never make it beyond the front porch or the lobby. And if man's mission is to reside in the fullness of the present, then he's got no space for the waterbed, anyhow, not even if he could lower it through a skylight.

present time past

Tom Robbins

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"Have you noticed," she asked him, "how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?"

present past

Mary Balogh

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There are things that once done can't be undone, things that once said can't be unsaid.

present past life reverse said the-neighbor undone mistakes

Lisa Gardner

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At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past.

present past

Haruki Murakami

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the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance.

present past

Jeanette Winterson

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"YOU HAVE TO BE STRONG ENOUGH TO BE WEAK Allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling. Notice any labels you attach to crying or feeling vulnerable. Let go of the labels. Just feel what you are feeling, all the while cultivating moment-to-moment awareness, riding the waves of "up" and "down," "good" and "bad," "weak" and "strong," until you see that they are all inadequate to fully describe your experience. Be with the experience itself. Trust in your deepest strength of all: to be present, to be wakeful."

present labels weak trust strength moment-to-moment-awareness riding-the-waves up-and-down wakeful weak-and-strong good-and-bad feeling mindfulness meditation experience strong vulnerable

Jon Kabat-Zinn

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In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.

present suicide young-adult youth future imagination beath decision teenager burden childhood dying

Rebecca Solnit

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Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it -- fragmentary and uncertain though it is -- that distinguishes man from all other animals

present human-being reality past

Colin Wilson

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Are we truly obeying the command to love our neighbor as ourselves if we're storing up money for potential future needs when our neighbor is laboring today under actual present needs?

current present future compassion love hoarding stewardship labor sharing selfish neighbor saving need justice

Randy Alcorn

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Memory is the enemy of wonder

present wonder memory

Michael Pollan

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When I save, I lay something aside for future need. If I sense God's leading, I will give it away to meet greater needs. When I hoard, I'm unwilling to part with what I've saved to meet others' needs, because my possible future needs outweigh their actual present needs. I fail to love my neighbor as myself.

present future compassion hoarding stewardship needs sharing saving protection

Randy Alcorn

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Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.

present history past happiness

Hermann Hesse

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Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.

present past mindfulness

Henry David Thoreau

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The only thing that makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture.

present torture

Chuck Palahniuk

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"That part of your life is over. Set it aside as something you have finished. Complete or no, it is done with you. No being gets to decide what his life is "supposed to be"...'Be a man. Discover where you are now, and go on from there, making the best of things. Accept your life, and you might survive it. If you hold back from it, insisting this is not your life, not where you are meant to be, life will pass you by. You may not die from such foolishness, but you might as well be dead for all the good your life will do you or anyone else."

present fate good future honesty past destiny life truth aside complete forgo meant not part section set survive to decide done finish discover over end path be forget dead

Robin Hobb

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When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.

present time music now time-passing present-moment

Ruth Ozeki

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In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.

present memories past west promises

Wade Davis

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Do you know that I love now to recall and visit at certain dates the places where I was once happy in my own way? I love to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past...

present

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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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?

present now

Paulo Coelho

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Future indifferences is no consolation for present pain.

present pain

Mary Balogh

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We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...] My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.

present time history past family life build-up chronology development generation-gap existentialism modernity

Wallace Stegner

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The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present.

present history past

Shashi Tharoor

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Every hour, stop and ask: Am I really present in this moment? If not, what are my thoughts focused on? Doing this often will help you return to the present moment.

present thoughts present-moment return moment

Azim Jamal & Brian Tracy

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Of an artistic temperament, I deny that I am; yet I must possess something of the artist's faculty of making the most of present pleasure.

present temperament pleasure

Charlotte Brontë

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[T]he concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine. ... Thought and deed conjoined are crucial. ... The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; successs or failure is secondary.

mankind present future success philosophy purification deeds souls goals divinity failure thought

Iain Pears

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If we know the past, and live the present, it is possible that we dream the future?

present past

Truman Capote

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"The Future," says Ian, in a film-trailer voice. "Coming soon, to a Present near you."

present future

David Mitchell

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In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.

present walden thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

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Our past thinking has determined our present status, and our present thinking will determine our future status; for man is what man thinks.

present thoughts past thinking

C.G. Jung

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If you would understand the present, you must come to know the past.

present understanding understand

Libba Bray

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while she wanted to look neither to her past nor her future, she lived exclusively in both. They had took different paths, but they had journeyed, so she realized, together.

present future past life thoughts-on-life thought-provoking

Monica Ali

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When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it's happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting. [...] We die without knowing what we have lived.

present time memory

Milan Kundera

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Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them.

present past the-west regret

Cormac McCarthy

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"I also came to see that I should not worry about tomorrow, next week, next year, or next century. The more willing I was to look honestly at what I was thinking and saying and doing now, the more easily I would come into touch with the movement of God's Spirit in me, leading me to the future. God is a God of the present and reveals to those who are willing to listen carefully to the moment in which they live the steps they are to take toward the future. "Do not worry about tomorrow," Jesus says, "tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own" (Matthew 6:34)."

present god-of-the-present holy-spirit today tomorrow revelation

Henri J.M. Nouwen

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There's so much to write. Where should I start? I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote me back this: 'You should start where you are

present individuality inspirational startup perspective creativity

Ruth Ozeki

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He ought to let the past keep its glow and not try to mix it with what he had in the present.

present time past past-and-present

Larry McMurtry

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It was strange how the future seemed tied inseparably to the past, so that both revolved through the present, like a great wheel...

present past

Tad Williams

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I would have no need for the Memory Of Things past if those which were Present were more agreeable

present past

Peter Ackroyd

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"I'll let you in on a little secret, Garry: everything is history. By the time you notice it, it's already happened. That famous imposter, "the present," disappears in the cognitive gap. Mind the gap!"

present history past

Edward St. Aubyn

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Faculty X is the ability to grasp the reality not simply of other times and places, but of the present moment as well.

present reality x places

Colin Wilson

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"Maybe a holiday miracle will change Mearth's awful behavior," Mandy suggested with optimism. "The only holiday miracle around here is that Mearth hasn't murdered us both yet," said Alecto, lighting another cigarette, his hands shaking erratically. He looked exhausted and terrified, his gray eyes soulless. "Do you know what Mearth likes, Alecto?" Mandy questioned. "Vegetables, she likes celery a lot, and lettuce," Alecto responded in a quiet monotone. "I don't know what else she likes. I've never asked her." "Well, she has to like something... doesn't everyone?" "Not her, Mandy Valems."

present miracle murder humor going-green hoiday lettuce mother-earth comedy cigarette christmas vegetables gift

Rebecca McNutt

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Diuen que cada floc de neu es diferent. Si aixo fos cert, com podria el mon anar endavant? Com podriem aixecar-nos de les nostres genuflexions? Com podriem recuperar-nos d'una meravella aixi? Oblidant. No podem tenir massa coses al cap. Nomes existeix el present i no hi ha res per a recordar.

present uniqueness

Jeanette Winterson

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I bought this the day before at a shopping mall. I didn't want to forget him. Maybe I didn't want him to forget me.

present parting gift remember

Mitch Albom

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Live in the present. Tomorrow is a puzzle you can only solve with the answers you find today.

present life-lessons live-in-the-present

Sean Patrick Brennan

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The present looks back at some great figure of an earlier century and wonders, Was he on our side? Was he a goodie? What a lack of self-confidence this implies: the present wants both to patronise the past by adjudicating on its political acceptability, and also to be flattered by it, to be patted on the back and told to keep up the good work.

present self-confidence

Julian Barnes

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The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or sorrow or wonder than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.

present time past now

Richard Flanagan

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How we present ourselves at any given time is dependent on the situation. We constantly balance the tension of high aspirations with the pragmatism of realistic expectations. The key is to represent ourselves in such a way that we can fulfill the expectations we create.

present high-aspirations matter-more pragmatic realistic-expectations realistic relevance tension

Marian Deegan

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The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

present time history past reflection introspection memory

Iris Murdoch