Present Quotes

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

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

Seneca

Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

That orgy of wishful thinking that has passed for logic in the present century.

F. W. Lawvere

Experience is the worst teacher it gives the test before presenting the lesson.

Vernon Law

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

Each present joy or sorrow seems the chief.

William Shakespeare

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

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

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

Senator William Grayson

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

Aristotle

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

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

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

Benjamin Disraeli

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

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

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

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

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

La Bruyere

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Dwight D. Eisenhowe

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

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

William Bolitho

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations, 200 A. D.

Learn from the past, Hope for the future, Live in the present.

Ken Lancaste

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

Louis D. Brandeis

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

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

We live in the present, we dream of the future, but we learn eternal truths from the past.

Madame Chiang

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

Charles Baudelaire

Be intent upon the perfection of the present day.

William Law