Top 100 Present Quotes
#1. I steeled myself to focus only on the present yet remain alert to what might come next.
Nicholas Sparks
#2. There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom ... their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#3. The secret is here in the present. If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better.
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
#4. The few questions I had asked had been futile and I was suddenly dispirited, for it had occurred to me that had Holmes been present, he would have probably have solved the entire mystery by now.
Anthony Horowitz
#5. I need to acknowledge that she may have controlled my past, but she doesn't have to dominate my present and my future, too
Carolyn Mackler
#6. The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time
for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.
C.S. Lewis
#7. The payoff of living in the past or the future is you never have to do your work in the present.
Steven Pressfield
#8. When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present - normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is no time for anything to happen.
Alan W. Watts
#9. Olduvai Gorge gives us one of the most remarkable stories of the past-the last chapter of the Earth's history, starting at the present day, right away back 2 million years.
Louis Leakey
#10. And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.
Albert Camus
#11. You can't solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and [the problem's] past history! When you have investigated the problem thoroughly, you will know how to solve it.
Mao Zedong
#12. Do not encumber your mind with useless thoughts. What good does it do to brood on the past or anticipate the future? Remain in the simplicity of the present moment.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
#13. First I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense inn it.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#14. The past needs the present and grows the future.
N.M. Singel
#15. Astronomy ... is of all others the science which seems to present to us the most striking instance of waste in nature.
Richard A. Proctor
#16. I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write
Katherine Mansfield
#17. Dad was just an emotional wreck. He was drinking a lot of the time, he was smoking a lot of pot. And because he takes certain medications, the drinking was making him ... you know, he wasn't even present, really.
Jack Osbourne
#18. Fear can be a natural ally, a homemade power source ... Staying in the present, fear can only help you.
Georges St-Pierre
#19. I glory in the distinguishing grace of God and will not, by the grace of God, step one inch from my principles or think of adhering to the present fashionable sort of religion.
Charles Spurgeon
#20. I love you, Trystan Scott, every bit of you; past, present, and future.
H.M. Ward
#21. One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.
Simone De Beauvoir
#22. Love is a living capacity within us that is always present, even when we don't sense it.
Sharon Salzberg
#23. Obviously, a skirt does present certain problems that I had to be aware of. But when it came to the shoot and we were rolling, I didn't really pay it any attention. It wasn't too bad.
Chiaki Kuriyama
#24. Instead, the act of going back made new memories, and everytime I went I would add another layer on top of her memory, until eventually I'd buried them completely and all of those places stopped being about my past with her and became my present.
Cecelia Ahern
#25. We can lay down our lives for those we love not by physically dying for them but rather by living for them - giving of our time; always being present in their lives; serving them; being courteous, affectionate, and showing true love for those of our family and to all men - as the Savior taught.
Claudio R.M. Costa
#26. Your dream is a reality that is waiting for you to materialize. Today is a new day! Don't let your history interfere with your destiny! Learn from your past so that it can empower your present and propel you to greatness
Steve Maraboli
#27. Time is a measurement of our past, present and future. Do you value your time or do you waste it.
Vicki Salter
#28. Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity.
Eckhart Tolle
#29. Now, my present, has arrived, and it's you.
Paulo Coelho
#30. I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.
Patricia Highsmith
#31. If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn't a problem. The mind didn't have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over.
Eckhart Tolle
#32. Nothing in your past is in your present making you do anything you don't choose to do. You are not your past history! You are not your past failures! You are not how others have at one time treated you! You are only who you are and what you do now in this moment.
Karen Salmansohn
#33. The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#34. I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
William Gibson
#35. 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.
#36. The accounts that history presents have to be paid. Past has to be reconciled with present in the life of a nation. History is an insistent force: the past is what put us where we are. the past cannot be put behind until it is settled with.
William Pfaff
#37. He thought about the next time he would laugh with her and then the next. He found himself often thinking about the future, even before the present was over.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#38. More reliably than anything else on earth, the road will force you to live in the present.
Gloria Steinem
#39. Messers Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs
Purveyors of Aids to magical Mischief-Makers
are proud to present
THE MARAUDER'S MAP
J.K. Rowling
#40. He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist.
Tracy Kidder
#41. Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.
Alan W. Watts
#42. Life is a series of choices that are made in the present moment.
Darren Main
#43. We seldom require more to the happiness of the present hour than to surpass him that stands next before us.
Samuel Johnson
#44. There is no greater example of government overreach and unrestrained liberalism than 'Obamacare.' It is so deeply flawed and such a clear and present threat to our economic stability that there is no way to fix it.
Tommy Thompson
#45. God is not pre or post anything. He is present to everything ... There is not predestination but destination, not predestiny but destiny. This follows from divine omniscience and eternity.
Peter Kreeft
#46. Every time you feel miserable, there is present an excellent opportunity to make a big step forward.
Lester Levenson
#47. Enormous cemeteries existed among sedentary civilizations, where the weight of the past grew larger than any present time.
Vernor Vinge
#48. Faith will tell us Christ is present, When our human senses fail.
Thomas Aquinas
#49. It is satisfying for the descendant of a dissident refugee from Elizabeth I to present his credentials to Elizabeth II.
Kingman Brewster Jr.
#50. Infinite was me trying to figure out how I wanted my rap style to be, how I wanted to sound on the mic and present myself. It was a growing stage. I felt like Infinite was like a demo that just got pressed up.
Eminem
#51. In the sense of attributing to the claimant a prognostic view of his present ailments, freedom has always been of the oppressed.
Ashfaq Saraf
#52. 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 and with a manly heart.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#53. The second industrial revolution doesn't present us, as the first did, with overwhelming images of rolling mills or molten steel, but rather with bits of information that flow, as electrical impulses, through circuits. We still have machines made of steel, but they now obey bits that are weightless.
Italo Calvino
#54. I'm a big proponent of young women dressing appropriately in the workplace to get ahead. We need to demand respect as women, and part of that involves how we present ourselves.
Rachel Roy
#55. At present, financial crises occur, chiefly because the paper currency is redeemable in gold only.
John Buchanan Robinson
#56. Our present control of the sea is so absolute that it is sometimes taken for granted.
Chester W. Nimitz
#57. He imagined his past gone, along with his future. Death was the understanding of the immediate present: that there is finally nothing else.
Anne Rice
#58. A stereotype may be negative or positive, but even positive stereotypes present two problems: They are cliches, and they present a human being as far more simple and uniform than any human being actually is.
Nancy Kress
#59. Jean was black and had to present himself as separate from graffiti somehow. Keith was gay and white and could glamorize graffiti in a way that Jean could not. Jean and Keith both understood this.
Jennifer Clement
#60. Your body exists in the past and your mind exists in the future. In yoga, they come together in the present.
B.K.S. Iyengar
#61. Yeah, I've banged some female costars. I swore I'd never tell their names, so instead I'll present some anagrams: Sahar Clahke and Haether Gharam.
Zach Braff
#62. We are a part of everything that is beneath us, above us, and around us. Our past is our present, our present is our future, and our future is seven generations past and present.
Winona LaDuke
#63. The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
Walter Benjamin
#64. You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.
Leopold Von Ranke
#65. Whatever we wish to achieve in the future, it must begin by knowing where we are in the present- not where we wish we were, or whee we wish others to think we are, but where we are in fact.
Thomas Sowell
#66. More than all, and above all, [George] Washington was master of himself. If there be one quality more than another in his character which may exercise a useful control over the men of the present hour, it is the total disregard of self when in the most elevated positions for influence and example.
Charles Francis Adams, Sr.
#67. We are always looking to the future; the present does not satisfy us. Our ideal, whatever it may be, lies further on.
Ezra Hall Gillett
#68. What a world we live in. I want to be incredibly close to the heart of it all. To live honestly, truthfully and to be completely present is the ultimate enterprise.
Dianna Agron
#70. You must be deadly serious in training. When I say that, I do not mean that you should be reasonably diligent or moderately in earnest. I mean that your opponent must always be present in your mind, whether you sit or stand or walk or raise your arms.
Gichin Funakoshi
#71. I love you present tense," I whispered, and then put my hand on the middle of his chest and said, "It's okay, Gus. It's okay. It is. It's okay, you hear me?" I had - and have - absolutely no confidence that he could hear me. I leaned forward and kissed his cheek. "Okay," I said. "Okay.
John Green
#72. We wanted to present the Headless Horseman in a new light. That's where the fun comes in, of just diving in.
Roberto Orci
#73. If you want to change the future, then you are going to have to trouble the present.
William Booth
#74. Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.
Will Self
#75. Our past affects us, our present affects us, and even our future can affect us. We live in the relative world of time and space.
Frederick Lenz
#76. During the long period which elapsed between the Egyptian and the Babylonian servitudes, the hopes as well as fears of the Jews appear to have been confined within the narrow compass of the present life.
Edward Gibbon
#77. But while you were looking out the window, you missed the chance to explore the equally interesting Buddhist belief in being present for every facet of your daily life, of being truly present. Be present in this class. And then, when it's over, be present out there, he said,
John Green
#78. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another.
Virginia Woolf
#79. A lie is an abomination unto the Lord, and a very present help in trouble.
Adlai Stevenson I
#80. The constant nagging in your mind of undone things pulls you out of the present
tethers you to a mind-set of the future so that you're never fully in the moment and enjoying what's now.
Daniel Levitin
#81. When I'm present, I meet I AM, the very presence of a present God. In His embrace, time loses all sense of speed and stress and space and stands so still and ... holy. Here is the only place I can love Him.
Ann Voskamp
#82. I think after Christmas would be better for publication: I am hardly a Christmas present.
Oscar Wilde
#83. I believe that nothing passes without a trace and that each of our smallest steps has significance for the present and the future.
Anton Chekhov
#84. The tense of the body is the present indicative; but the soul has a memory and a present and a future. I have conceived some extremely recondite pains for Mr. Trellis. I will pierce him with a pluperfect.
Flann O'Brien
#85. So being present becomes more and more the exercise the older you get.
Paul Michael Glaser
#86. What is the gospel according to Jesus? Simply this: that the love we all long for in our innermost heart is already present, beyond longing.
Stephen Mitchell
#87. When contrasted with the much longer time that life has been present, the course of Christianity thus far is but a brief moment.
Kenneth Scott Latourette
#88. Yes, memories do haunt. Memories of a happy past, in the expectation of a bleak future, in a sad present. - Anita
Nilesh Sakpal
#89. A mathematical point is the most indivisble and unique thing which art can present.
John Donne
#90. Transformation is not five minutes from now; it's a present activity. In this moment you can make a different choice, and it's these small choices and successes that build up over time to help cultivate a healthy self-image and self esteem.
Jillian Michaels
#91. The future promise of any nation can be directly measured by the present prospects of its youth.
John F. Kennedy
#92. Before we took down the tree each year, Dad would always say a prayer that we would be together the next Christmas. I cling to that prayer, which serves as a reminder that it's important to be grateful in the present for the people you love because, well, you never know.
Catherine Hicks
#93. As I get older, the present and the past shift and become the past and the future ... A lot of it is a new awareness of time and life and the wheel of fortune crushing you and lifting you and crushing you and lifting you.
Feist
#94. squeezed the present for all it was worth. He believed meaning is found only in the present, for the past is gone and the future looms indeterminate if it arrives at all.
William Manchester
#95. It has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it
Marshall McLuhan
#97. I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
Virginia Woolf
#98. Our present reality is the result of our past imaginations. Our future reality is a result of our present imaginations.
Pieter DeWet
#99. I like the present. I'm always interested in new ideas, and what's happening. I'm not nostalgic.
Douglas Coupland
#100. The only way to change the future is to change the present.
Seohyun
