Present Quotes

Learning to live in the present moment is part of the path of joy.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

I am treating you as my friend asking you share my present minuses in the hope I can ask you to share my future pluses.

Katherine Mansfield

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.

Buddha

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.

Buddha

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

Seneca

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with it apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.

Norman Podhoretz

It is the contention of this observer that few homicides due to shooting could be avoided merely if a firearm were not immediately present, and that the offender would select some other weapon to achieve the same destructive goal.

Marvin E. Wolfgang

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Anais Nin

We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future.

Jeseph Joubert

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Albert Einstein

The present is theirs the future, for which I really worked, is mine.

Nikola Tesla

At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - If it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years.

Arthur C. Clarke, 1983

Make yourself familiar with the angels, and behold them frequently in spirit for without being seen, they are present with you.

Saint Francis de Sales

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.

Russell Hoban

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness (1930) ch. 14

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

R. D. Laing

Be intent upon the perfection of the present day.

William Law

You need more fact in the dangerous art of giving presents than in any other social action.

William Bolitho

It is satisfying for the descendant of a dissident refugee from Elizabeth I to present his credentials to Elizabeth II.

Kingman Brewster, Jr.

The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse.

Benjamin Franklin

Only those books come down which deserve to last. All the gilt edges, vellum and morocco, all the presentation copies to all the libraries will not preserve a book in circulation beyond its intrinsic date.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Geschichte ist... ein Dialog zwischen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit. re - Transl.: History is... a dialogue between the present and the past.

Edward Hallet Carr, Was ist Geschichte?, S. 54

Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future one.

Seneca

It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes in The Copper Beeches

Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. In is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and a manly heart.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In this present moment we are either smaller than we once were or else are on our knees.

Alan Moore, Birth Caul

We simply rob ourselves when we make presents to the dead.

Publilius Syrus

Past and to come seem best things present worst.

Mary Bertone

The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

Maya Angelou

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

R. D. Laing

Most people live ninety percent in the past, seven percent in the present, and that only leaves three percent for the future.

John Steinbeck, The Winter of our Discontent

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. Announcing blockade of Cuba.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

Susan Sontag

Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

Thich Nhat Hanh