Present Quotes

Art can only be truly Art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

Margaret Fulle

For there is no greater pain, than to remember in present grief, past happinesses.

Dante, The Divine Comedy

Present your religion to a little child, set him in the midst of those who profess it. If it frightens him, and freezes the smiles on his lips, then whatever sort of religion it is, it is not Christianity.

Unknown

The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1845

As the same fire assumes different shapes When it consumes objects differing in shape, So does the one Self take the shape Of every creature in whom he is present.

Maitri Upanishads

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

Taxation without representation is tyranny.

James Otis

Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end results of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.

Eric Hoffe

To live in the past or in the future may be less satisfying than to live in the present, but it can never be as disillusioning.

R. D. Laing

It is equally wrong to speed a guest who does not want to go, and to keep one back who is eager. You ought to make welcome the present guest, and send forth the one who wishes to go.

Homer, The Odyssey

If I had the time to sit down and write a thank - You note to everyone who sent me a nice, expensive present, what a wonderful world that would be.

Jack Handey Deep Thoughts

Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present - which seldom happens to us.

Jean De La Bruyere

And once again Mr. Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complexity of human life so pletifuly presents.

Sir Arther Connan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

Joseph Addison

For Africa to me is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Maya Angelou

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

Leonardo Da Vinci

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

Norman Podhoretz

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Edmund Burke, Speech to the electors of Bristol. 3 Nov. 1774

Thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.

Henry James, "The Ambassadors", Book Fourth, Chapter 2

Most people my age are dead at the present time.

Casey Stengel

I was born old and get younger every day. At present I am sixty years young.

Herbert Beerbohm Tree

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

Last Monday a string of amendments were presented to the lower House these altogether respect personal liberty...

Senator William Grayson

Where fear is present, wisdom cannot be.

Lactantius

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

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

Anais Nin

A friend is a present you give yourself.

Robert Louis Stevenson

My past is my wisdom to use today... my future is my wisdom yet to experience. Be in the present because that is where life resides.

Gene Oliver, Life and the Artistry of Change

All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.

Benjamin Franklin

The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.

Dietrich Bonhoeffe

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

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

There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.

Anatole Broyard

If there were a verb meaning to believe falsely, it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Forget the past and live the present hour.

Sarah Knowles Bolton

Angels may be very excellent sort of folk in their own way, but we, poor mortals in our present state, would probably find them precious slow company.

Jerome K. Jerome