Present Quotes

Past and to come seem best things present worst.

Mary Bertone

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

As we look deeply within, we understand our perfect balance. There is no fear of the cycle of birth, life and death. For when you stand in the present moment, you are timeless.

Rodney Yee

The honey from the flowers of the senses, Ever present within, ruler of time, Goes beyond fear. For this Self is Supreme.

Maitri Upanishads

A fool judges people by the presents they give him.

Chinese Prove

Equation 1. 2 - 9 is a second order, nonlinear, vector, differential equation which has defied solution in its present form. It is here therefore we depart from the realities of nature to make some simplifying assumptions...

Bate, Mueller & White, 1971, "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics".

Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.

Alfonso the Wise

I came into the world either too early or too late at present, I am good for nothing.

Prince Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar von Metternich

Life is a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.

Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Albert Einstein

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

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.

Louis D. Brandeis

Each present joy or sorrow seems the chief.

William Shakespeare

Wherever a set of alternative possible routes toward achieving a given end presents itself, a student movement will tend to choose the one which involves a higher measure of violence or humiliation directed against the older generation.

Lewis S Feue

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

You are young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as a judge of the highest matters.

Plato, Dialogues, Theatetus

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self - Direction, and for self - Initiated learning.

Carl R. Rogers

The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.

Paul Klee

Life is divided into three terms - That which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.

William Wordsworth

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

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

Katherine Mansfield

I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back.

Albert Camus, The Strange

As the representatives of the people we are here to declare that our resolve has not been weakened by these horrific and cowardly acts. referring to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Tom Daschle

A gift, with a kind countenance, is a double present.

Thomas Fulle

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

Publilius Syrus

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

R. D. Laing

You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.

Jan Glidewell

Real generosity toward the future consists in giving all to what is present.

Albert Camus

The present is a rope stretched over the past. The secret to walking it is, you never look down.

Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle, 2004

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Aristotle

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, 1954

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

Kingman Brewster, Jr.

Pick a man for his human qualities, his values, his compatibility with you, rather than what he represents in status, power or good looks.

Carol Botwin

Look not mournfully into the past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future, without fear.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The most dangerous aspect of present - Day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.

Eugenio Montale

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Alan Moore, Birth Caul