Top 100 Present By Quotes
#1. The past defines us as much as the present. By never knowing my past, I was never sure of who I was. Because mine was missing, I never felt whole.
Arlene J. Chai
#2. 'Movement is life;' and it is well to be able to forget the past, and kill the present by continual change.
Jules Verne
#3. My brain goes in just one direction. The Future. I don't worry about the present. By the time you talk about the present, it's gone.
Stefano Pessina
#4. Philosophy isn't programmed into us, and a lot of the forces of our culture steadfastly work against it. Philosophy, for me, is a way of resisting the nihilism of the present by making, creating, affirming. By going on.
Simon Critchley
#5. The future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.
C. D. Broad
#6. The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.
Anton Chekhov
#7. You can't judge the present by the past. Each day is different, and you live it differently.
Marty Rubin
#8. In reality there is nothing to fear in the present. Fear is projected onto the present by memory.
Deepak Chopra
#9. In the process of trying to steady my gait in a life that shook with
uncertainty, I learned to make peace with the present by unknowingly
breaking love lines to the past. Growing up in a landscape of
improvised dreams and abstract national longings, everything felt
temporary to me.
Susan Abulhawa
#10. Farmers present by themselves the basic force of the national movement. Without farmers there can be no strong national movement. This is what we mean when we say that the nationalist question, is actually, the farmers' question.
Joseph Stalin
#11. I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn't make itself apparent at all, in the ideal case.
Jonathan Miller
#12. When you do what's important now for you, you create a past that leaves you ready to handle the present. By default, the future is taking care of itself as you make decisions that are acceptable to you no matter what happens tomorrow.
John Kuypers
#13. People cling to their rotten memories, to all their misfortunes, and you can't pry them loose. These things keep them busy. They avenge themselves for the injustice of the present by smearing the future inside them with this shit. They're cowards deep down, and just. That's their nature.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#14. Each and every event in the past is connected to the present by invisible threads.
Momofuku Ando
#15. Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!
Henry James
#16. I would point out that the cultural advance of these people has been suppressed in the past and continues to be suppressed in the present by policies designed to keep them in ignorance.
Hideki Tojo
#17. That is why she dislikes dreams: they impose an unacceptable equivalence among the various periods of the same life, a leveling contemporaneity of everything a person has ever experienced; they discredit the present by denying it its privileged status.
Milan Kundera
#18. What is really momentous and all-important with us is the present, by which the future is shaped and colored.
John Greenleaf Whittier
#20. God is everywhere present by His power. He rolls the orbs of heaven with His hand; He fixes the earth with His foot; He guides all creatures with His eye, and refreshes them with His influence; He makes the powers of hell to shake with His terrors, and binds the devils with His word.
Jeremy Taylor
#21. Being In The Present Means Tuning Out Distractions And Paying Attention To What Is Important, Now. You Create Your Own Present By What You Give Your Attention To Today.
Spencer Johnson
#22. Since the grasses are being parasitised, they grow less, leaving more room for other flowering plants. Pywell demonstrated that sowing rattle seed into an English meadow significantly boosted the diversity of flowers present by suppressing growth of grasses.
Dave Goulson
#23. We sometimes condemn the present, by praising the past; and show our contempt of what is now, by our esteem for what is no more.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#24. Great art does not break with the past. It breaks with the present by emulating the best of the past.
Walter Darby Bannard
#25. It's not a matter of rejection (of Israel's existence). Israel is here, present by power.
Mahmoud Al-Zahar
#26. To us, recollection is a holy act; we sanctify the present by remembering the past. To us Jews, the essence of faith is memory. To believe is to remember.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#27. A lot of my work comes through accidents or circumstances that just happen to present themselves. I have to realize that something is presenting itself. Otherwise it slips right by.
Ari Marcopoulos
#28. You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
A.S. Byatt
#29. Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.
G.K. Chesterton
#30. God is unlimited and infinite with respect to time; He is eternal. God is unlimited and unaffected by space; He is present everywhere at the same time.
David Jeremiah
#31. The erotic element always present in fashion, the kiss of loving labor on the body, is now overtly expressed by language. Belts hug or clasp; necklines plunge; jerseys bind. The word exciting tingles everywhere.
Mary McCarthy
#32. Life is in a constant state of change and by evolving in the present with change - Matthew Donnelly
Matthew Donnelly
#33. You can tell a person's past, present and future by listening to the words they use.
Robert Kiyosaki
#34. If you believe in resurrection, you believe that the living God will put his world to rights and that if God wants to do that in the future, it is right to try to anticipate that by whatever means in the present.
N. T. Wright
#35. When we are motivated by compassion and wisdom, the results of our actions benefit everyone, not just our individual selves or some immediate convenience. When we are able to recognize and forgive ignorant actions of the past, we gain strength to constructively solve the problems of the present.
Dalai Lama XIV
#36. A person experiences anxiety when they realize their insignificance in the cosmic field, which present state of angst can exacerbated by other confusing life questions.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#37. When I'm feeling sad, or lonely, and I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know where I'm going, I imagine the Cool Awesome Future Version of Myself just telling my present self, "It's okay. You just gotta grab that giraffe by the ears and ride it on out."
Jenna Marbles
#38. A mindful parent is one who is committed to practicing being present and awake, and to listening deeply to her child, moment by moment. Mindfulness depends upon awareness.
Shauna L. Shapiro
#39. Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the inquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#40. Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America
Eric Hoffer
#41. Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.
W.G. Sebald
#42. Well, I started conducting kind of by accident. I wanted to give myself a special birthday present for my fortieth birthday, and I was living in San Francisco at the time and I started attending some of the concerts and then simply dropping hints.
Bobby McFerrin
#43. Those who are absent, by its means become present: correspondence is the consolation of life. - VOLTAIRE, Philosophical Dictionary
Colin Dexter
#44. The best way to get a sense of what kinds of emergencies might present themselves in your community is by contacting local chapters of the American Red Cross or offices of emergency management in the region or state. Most large cities will have their own offices of emergency management.
Irwin Redlener
#45. Women are degraded by the propensity to enjoy the present moment, and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#46. I always liked it when people go back in time to discover things about themselves, like with 'A Christmas Carol' and you're getting a tour of your life by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.
John Cusack
#47. What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future.
N. T. Wright
#48. Only by a life of obedience to the voice of the Spirit, by a daily denying of self, by full dedication to Christ, and by constant fellowship with Him are we enabled to live a godly life and an influential life in this present ungodly world.
Billy Graham
#49. The people to become enlightened in Atlantis lit the "flame of enlightenment" on earth for the first time. The members of the various mystery schools have kept the flame alive by passing on the secret techniques for attaining enlightenment from the time of Atlantis to our present day.
Frederick Lenz
#50. Each wave of sightings adds to the accumulation of reports which defy analysis by present methods ... An investigative process in depth is necessary here if, after twenty years of confusion, we want some answers.
J. Allen Hynek
#51. The American Gun movement is actually very easy to understand. All of them, little boys with self esteem issues, exacerbated by an ever-present gun/phallic relation disorder. Apparently big guns fit well in small hands.
T. Rafael Cimino
#52. The only possible relationship with God is to address him and to be addressed by him, here and now - or, as Buber puts it, in the present.
Martin Buber
#53. The present time of believers is no longer determined by the past. It takes its definition from the future.
Jurgen Moltmann
#54. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it ... we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#55. Not only have past processes made us what we are-"modern" or "postmodern" selves, rather than "medieval" or "early modern" selves-but by explaining them we both account for and implicitly justify present realities.
Brad S. Gregory
#56. [M]ore wars have been waged, more people killed, and more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history. The sad truth continues in our present day.
Charles Kimball
#57. New York has never learnt the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs.
Michel De Certeau
#58. Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.
Joseph Campbell
#59. Dangerous because your present Administration and its specialized agencies by all accounts know no restraint in hitting out at any perceived enemy of America, and nobody or nothing can protect one from their vindictiveness.
Breyten Breytenbach
#60. No man ever did, nor ever shall, truly go forth to convert the nations, nor to prophesy in the present state of witnesses against Antichrist, but by the gracious inspiration and instigation of the Holy Spirit of God.
Roger Williams
#61. But sin should never consume our focus at the expense of our confidence in the power and sufficiency of Christ. There is little danger in thinking lowly of ourselves. The ever-present danger faced by the Christian is thinking too lowly of Christ. Christ is our identity, not indwelling sin.
Tony Reinke
#62. Women's bodies are public domain, as evidenced clearly at the present time by the furor over abortion. Everyone has an opinion about what a woman should or should not do with her body.
Maureen Murdock
#63. Many humanists in the West are stirred by a sense of outrage at what professed Christians, past and present, have done; and this makes them see their humanism as a kind of crusade, with the killing of Christianity as its prime goal.
J.I. Packer
#64. My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.
Amy Tan
#65. The preachers of past failures are the detractors of the success of the present and jeopardizers of the future
ABC
#66. The presence and the present of America are a future; our continent is, by its nature, the land which does not exist on its own, but as something which is created and invented.
Octavio Paz
#67. Was it possible that, if there wasn't someone present to watch a soul pass from this side to the next, that soul could become trapped by the sorrow of that very spot;
Ania Ahlborn
#68. People instinctively turn to the past to understand the present. But the questions the historian asks are given to him or her by the world they live in.
Eric Foner
#69. 18O my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations, and the city that is called by your name. For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#70. For when an old man relives his life, he lives it only by dwelling upon his memories; and when wisdom in an old man has outgrown the immediate impressions of life, the past viewed from the quiet of memory is something different from the present in all its bustle. The
Soren Kierkegaard
#71. The adjective sleazy must have acquired its present-day meaning to conform to its sound shape. A word cannot exist in slums, surrounded by slatterns and sluts, and preserve its purity amid all this slime.
Anatoly Liberman
#72. Always obey your parents. When they are present. This is the best policy in the long run. Because if you don't, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.
Mark Twain
#73. Enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by
Jane Austen
#74. But our own selves are like pearls, created by layer after layer of present laid over past until the original thing is completely hidden.
Tad Williams
#75. The paradox is that we can become wiser and more compassionate and live more fulfilling lives by refusing to be who we have tended to be in the past. But we must also relax, accepting things as they are in the present, as we strive to change ourselves.
Sam Harris
#76. Since that time up until the present time, there have been progress, and changes all through the time. The changes have not come by themselves; these changes have come from the doings of everyone in the country.
Bhumibol Adulyadej
#77. When there's a dead body in the room, you never, ever answer cops' questions without your lawyer present. Which is to say, your lawyer answers the questions by saying, We have nothing to say at this time.
Paul Levine
#78. Sherry ... a silly, sickly compound, the use of which will transform a nation, however bold and warlike by nature, into a race of sketchers, scribblers, and punsters, in fact into what Englishmen are at the present day.
George Henry Borrow
#79. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#80. By taking control of the present, you are choosing to alter the past you are making for yourself, and your future too.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
#81. There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world.
Paul Dirac
#82. Happiness in the present is only shattered by comparison with the past.
Douglas Horton
#83. I had always owned them to be the Word of God ... the careful reading of the Acts afforded me a practical picture of the early church; which made me feel deeply the contrast with its actual present state; though still, as ever beloved by God.
John Nelson Darby
#84. Though liberty is established by law, we must be vigilant, for liberty to enslave us is always present under that very liberty. Our Constitution speaks of the "general welfare of the people." Under that phrase all sorts of excesses can be employed by lusting tyrants to make us bondsmen.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#85. You can miss an experience by obsessing over how to contain it.
Gina Greenlee
#86. History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.
Aidan Chambers
#87. By living exclusively for the present, we let ourselves be hemmed in by an ocean of death. Conversely, by reviving the past, we enlarge our living space.
Amin Maalouf
#88. The ghost of a smile appeared on her face. Learn to love the moment you are in. Treasure your experiences, for precious moments too quickly pass you by, and if you are always rushing toward the future, or pining for the past, you will forget to enjoy and appreciate the present.
Colleen Houck
#89. We do not heal the past by dwelling there; we heal the past by living fully in the present.
Marianne Williamson
#90. What if Americans were all judged by the actions of the Bush administration and people did not know the truth? That America is full of people who are, at present, poorly represented and poorly catered to by the media.
Henry Rollins
#91. You are treating yourself in present time much as you were treated by others in the past. And you punish yourself far more than anyone would ever punish you.
L. Ron Hubbard
#92. By letting go of what is known, you are free to encounter the living present, in all its perplexity and revelation. Just as silence is the possibility of sound, self-confessed ignorance is the possibility of encounter.
Philip Shepherd
#93. Relations of production are first reproduced by the materiality of the processes of production and circulation. But it should not be forgotten that ideological relations are immediately present in these same processes.
Louis Althusser
#94. In one thing you have not changed, dear friend," said Aragorn: "you still speak in riddles."
"What? In riddles?" said Gandalf. "No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#95. Everything which is done in the present, affects the future by consequence, and the past by redemption.
Paulo Coelho
#96. The individual needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and psychological being but also a spiritual being, that is creature, and existing for the purposes of his Creator and subject to Him.
Peter Drucker
#97. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life.
Anonymous
#98. It is disgraceful when the passers-by exclaim, O ancient house! alas, how unlike is thy present master to thy former one.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#99. The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment.
J. Michael Straczynski
#100. Psychoanalysis is a new version of the ancient theme shared by all the great religions. The loss of illusion, the giving up of attachment to a false reality, the inevitability of suffering and expiation are all present in psychoanalysis. Every person who seeks analysis is on a personal pilgrimage.
Margaret Arden
