Quotes About Time And The Present

#1. The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.

Peter Benchley

#2. Your identity or potentials need to develop relevance, get education, possess content, technical improvement to be relevant to time and the present context. The anointing of yesterday will not do for the work of today.

Ikechukwu Joseph

#3. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.

Robert Kennedy

#4. 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

#5. In ancient times people mistook us for gods, but we peculiars are no less mortal than common folk. Time loops merely delay the inevitable, and the price we pay for using them is hefty - an irrevocable divorce from the ongoing present.

Ransom Riggs

#6. Do you feel bored and stuck in a rut? Is work drudgery? If so, you are spending far too much time bemoaning your fate and how the universe is not cooperating with your desires. Be present with and in your current situation.

Srikumar Rao

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. The best adventures in life is in the present. Seize the present and make it great adventure.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#10. Your desire or beliefs will literally be reaching back into time, teaching the nerves new tricks. Definite reorganizations in that past will occur in your present, allowing you to behave in entirely new fashions. Learned behavior therefore alters not only present and future but also past conduct.

Jane Roberts

#11. The big white house glowed on the hill above them, tranquil in the afternoon light, the big red spruce behind it a looming but benign presence; not for the first time, he felt that the tree was somehow guarding the house - and in his present fragile mental state, found that notion a comfort.

Diana Gabaldon

#12. Whenever armed forces ... are used, the idea of combat must be present ... The end for which a soldier is recruited, clothed, armed, and trained, the whole object of his sleeping, eating, drinking, and marching is simply that he should fight at the right place and the right time.

Carl Von Clausewitz

#13. There was only present, and it was infinite. The past and the future were just blinders we wore so that infinity wouldn't drive us mad.

Laini Taylor

#14. 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

#15. These things excite me so,' she whispered. 'If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I'll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a green card.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#16. Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act
act in the living Present! Heart within and God overhead.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#17. You and I move through time like a flame on a string. The ashes behind are the past, consumed, unreachable. The string ahead is the future. But the only moment we inhabit, the only moment where we can act, is the present, the point where the flame burns, the point where time touches eternity.

Brandon Mull

#18. From my parents, I learned a very strong work ethic, and all of my brothers and sisters all worked from the earliest days of life right through to the present time.

George J. Mitchell

#19. One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.

Robert Harris

#20. In the world of the present, in our time, we feel that suffering, anguish, the torments of body and soul, are greater than ever before in the history of mankind.

Eyvind Johnson

#21. 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

#22. Imagine for a moment your own version of a perfect future. See yourself in that future with everything you could wish for at this very moment fulfilled. Now take the memory of that future and bring it here into the present. Let it influence how you will behave from this moment on.

Deepak Chopra

#23. I had this crazy, a bit of a near-death experience in Estonia. I had these visions of the future but I was in this state where I felt the past, the present, and the future were all happening at the same time.

Taraka Larson

#24. I was reminded of the Four Immutable Laws of the Spirit: Whoever is present are the right people. Whenever it begins is the right time. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. And when it's over, it's over.

Anne Lamott

#25. You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.
It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us.

Stefan Molyneux

#26. I am very present in my work and my work is somehow an expression of my soul, but at the same time I think that a writer cannot write out of nothing.

Paulo Coelho

#27. Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction
a period in which past, present, and future are rewoven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology.

Louise J. Kaplan

#28. 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

#29. Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow is beyond our reach. The best time to write is now, in the present.

M. Kirin

#30. I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time. Yet

Will Schwalbe

#31. The sense of war, the extraordinary bravery of the Allied armies, the numbers, the losses, the real suffering that disappears in time and commemorative oratory, are not marked out in any red guidebook of the emotions, but they are present if you look.

John Vinocur

#32. It's the age of daring. It's the only time we have. We must live in the present. We are young and alive.

Gregory Maguire

#33. When we leave our child in nursery school for the first time, it won't be just our child's feelings about separation that we will have to cope with, but our own feelings as well-from our present and from our past, parents are extra vulnerable to new tremors from old earthquakes.

Fred Rogers

#34. Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogenous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now.

Salman Rushdie

#35. MOTHER TIME: The past is always with us, dear, for better or worse. It is what it is and you can't change it. All you can do is learn how to live with it in the present.

Hillary DePiano

#36. Time that is spent dwelling on the past will surely continue in your present moment - and the future.

Michelle Cruz-Rosado

#37. 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

#38. The pictures remind you of something that can never be recaptured, the time is gone, the only thing you know is the present. That's all that's knowable and even the present isn't knowable. The present becomes the past ... so you really don't know anything.

William Shatner

#39. But for me to have the opportunity to stand in front of a bunch of executives and present myself, I had to hustle in my own way. I can't tell you how frustrating it was that they didn't get that. No joke - I'd leave meetings crying all the time.

Kanye West

#40. Time is made of moments.
The present is today.
New day and new grace.
Today is my precious time on earth.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#41. When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.

Ruth Ozeki

#42. It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. "Future ages shall talk of this; they shall be famous to all posterity;" whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.

Jonathan Swift

#43. 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

#44. Enjoy the present, bid defiance to the future, laugh at all those reasonable beings who exercise their reason to avoid the misfortunes which they fear, destroying at the same time the pleasure that they might enjoy.

Giacomo Casanova

#45. Those who are ignorant of history and the evolution of taste are apt at every turn to make the present age their standard, and imagine nothing so barbarous or savage but what is contrary to the manners of their own time.

Anthony Ashley Cooper III

#46. What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided - they were one and the same thing.

Paolo Sorrentino

#47. I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evangelical belief.

George Eliot

#48. One condemns the whole past as a time of ignorance and prejudice, while knowing nothing of that past and very little of the present.

Julia P. Gelardi

#49. All the communions of a life-time are one communion.All the communions of all men now living are one communion.All the communions of all men, present, past and future, are one communion.

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

#50. Time ...
Once it's gone, it belongs to the past.
We do not hold on to the now, and
We do not treasure the future ...
We keep receiving this present, but we never open and cherish it until it is too late.
Until it comes no more.

Michelle Horst

#51. Abridge your hopes in proportion to the shortness of the span of human life; for while we converse, the hours, as if envious of our pleasure, fly away: enjoy, therefore, the present time, and trust not too much to what to-morrow may produce.

Horace

#52. Just watching an animal closely can take you out of your mind and bring you into the present moment, which is where the animal lives all the time
surrendered to life.

Eckhart Tolle

#53. But time soon passes. Even the deepest pain eventually loses its edge in the more vivid reality of the present; then, what once was unbearable becomes strangely familiar. And after much familiarity, it assumes the insignificance of just another milestone, ever marking the journey to higher ground.

N. Maria Kwami

#54. The feeling of this both being present and at the same time real, the feeling of eternity, completely filled every aspect of his being. Deeply he felt, more deeply than ever before, in this hour, the indestructibility of every life, the eternity of every moment.

Hermann Hesse

#55. Don't let the darkness of your past block the light of joy in your present. What happened is done. Stop giving time to things that no longer exist when there is so much joy to be found in the here and now.

Karen Salmansohn

#56. Time also was said to be an accident: it "exists not by itself; but simply from the things which happen, the sense apprehends what has been done in time past, as well as what is present, and what is to follow after.

Matthew Moncrieff Pattison Muir

#57. They would no longer be time-bound, that they were free to live in the future, the past, in fantasy.
She had been a woman preparing to live, not living.

Kiana Davenport

#58. Live in the NOW. Live life to its fullest. Don't spend more than 10% of your time learning from the past, and 20% planning for the future. Live in the present, act NOW to fulfill the dreams you plan.

Vikrmn

#59. When you mix with the wrong energy, there's bound to be an explosion. Pay attention and switch lanes when the signal changes. What's really real, is ultimately revealed.

T.F. Hodge

#60. The far we can see, we are! It is time we lifted our eyes beyond the horizon of our present boundaries and see goodies ahead of us.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#61. A lot of the time I'm in the present, and I'm thinking about the past or scheming about the future and missing every present moment, instead of actually partaking of the sacrament of every present moment.

R.D. Laing

#62. There are certain ways in which I cultivate awareness, both through mindful yoga and taking care of my body and taking time to actually drop as deeply as possible into stillness, into whatever is unfolding in the present moment.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

#63. And besides (I told myself) wasn't it time to Move Forward, Let Go, turn from the garden that was locked to me? Live In The Present, Focus On The Now instead of grieving for what I could never have?

Donna Tartt

#64. America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.

Jean Baudrillard

#65. If danger arises in the present moment, there may be an emotion. There may even be pain. But that's a challenge, not a problem. For a problem to exist, you need time and repetitive mind activity.

Eckhart Tolle

#66. How many of the original songs survive intact from the slave cabins? Probably not many in their original form. Time has transformed them like light in a prism. What we hope to present is a version of those spirituals, and they speak not just to black Americans, but to people worldwide.

Kathleen Battle

#67. The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.

Victor Hugo

#68. He slipped a dollar bill into a machine for a plastic soda bottle. Prices and plastic bottles with cute names signaled he was in the present day. That and the tattooed arm that reached for the bottle.

Jaime Allison Parker

#69. Children raised with love and compassion will be free to use their time as adults in meaningful and creative ways, rather than expressing their childhood hurts in ways that harm themselves or others. If adults have no need to deal with the past, they can live fully in the present.

Jan Hunt

#70. To live in an evolutionary spirit means to engage with full ambition and without any reserve in the structure of the present, and yet to let go and flow into a new structure when the right time has come.

Erich Jantsch

#71. The fact that we have to fight for something so essential to life as the integrity of seeds, speaks to the real drama of this present time: that we have to fight to preserve what is most fundamental and sacred to life.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

#72. That's the problem with all of us. We've never time to think about the past, and we're always planning for the future. And since the future's always the future, we never live in the present.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#73. Bear in Mind ... that all Histories from the Rock at Plymouth, and Jamestown to the present time, have been made by white men, and a man who tells his own story, is always right until the adversary's tale is told.

Sam Houston

#74. Rather than standing defiant screaming to the winds to bring the storm,
be focused, grateful for the time to prepare and learn to harness it.

Tom Althouse

#75. The Past
the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf
the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

Walt Whitman

#76. We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time.

Virginia Woolf

#77. She was my past, my present, my everything, and when the time came I'd make her my forever.

Angela McPherson

#78. Experience each moment as if it were the first sensation of its kind ever. Bring childlike interest and curiosity to your present-time experience.

Noah Levine

#79. 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

#80. Once, there were no predators, no prey. Only harmony. There were no quakes, no storms, everything in balance. In the beginning, time was all at once and forever - no past, present, and future, no death. We broke it all.

Dean Koontz

#81. The day before yesterday always has been a glamour day. The present is sordid and prosaic. Time colors history as it does a meerschaum pipe.

Vincent Starrett

#82. For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.

Michael Pollan

#83. Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past.

Sarah Perry

#84. at the sky, thinking about space and time and my mother, who was both my past and my present, and who, for all I knew, was up there twinkling somewhere. He

Camille Pagan

#85. Space and time are real for the man who is yet imperfect, and space is divided for him into dimensions; time, into past, present, and future.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#86. The time is now, the place is here. Stay in the present. You can do nothing to change the past, and the future will never come exactly as you plan or hope for.

Dan Millman

#87. He said something interesting: he said that he thinks there is only free will when you are in time, in the present. He says in the past we can only do what we did, and we can only be there if we were there.

Audrey Niffenegger

#88. The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.

George Santayana

#89. 'Floating Worlds,' published in 1975 and the lone science fiction novel by acclaimed historical novelist Cecelia Holland, was unique in being completely devoid of the usual pulp influences present in much space opera up to that time.

Pamela Sargent

#90. Too many leaders are so caught up in the momentum of work that they lose sight of the opportunity to connect with people. I discovered that the more fully present I was with other people, the more fully present they were with me, and the more productive our relationship became over time.

Douglas Conant

#91. Live one day at a time. Keep your attention in present time. Have no expectations. Make no judgements. And give up the need to know why things happen as they do. Give it up!

Caroline Myss

#92. Photography's vaunted capture of a moment in time is the seizure and freezing of presence. It is the image of simultaneity, of the way that everything within a given space at a given moment is present to everything else; it is a declaration of the seamless integrity of the real.

Rosalind E. Krauss

#93. You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.

Barbara Brown Taylor

#94. We might realize that the present moment may be one of an eternal or sempiternal series of moments, all of which will resemble it because, in some ways, they are the present, and won't in other ways, because the present will be the past by that time.

John Ashbery

#95. Where the light is, and each thing clear,Separate from all others, standing in its place,I drink the time and touch whatever's near,And hope for day when the whole world has that face:For what assures her present every year?In dark accidents the mind's sufficient grace.

Delmore Schwartz

#96. Live in the present and shape the future, do not be casting lingering looks to the distant past for the past has passed away, never again to return.

Subramanya Bharathi

#97. It seems we would rather have a past filled with great scientists than just great artists and writers who could dream up these wonderful and awe-inspiring creations. It's a strange irony: we're spending our time trying to find the truth in our past, but creating myths of ourselves in the present.

Aditya Iyengar

#98. As for this present unhappy time, haunted by ghosts from a dead world and not yet at home in its own, its predicament is not unlike the predicament of the adolescent who has not yet learned to orient himself without reference to the mythology amid which his childhood was passed.

Joseph Wood Krutch

#99. Next time you're faced with a credit-purchase decision, wait. Don't say no necessarily. Just wait. I challenge you to present your need to the Lord before presenting it to a bank, and see what He does with it.

Charles R. Swindoll

#100. There's no time like the present to love deeply, claim our power and live our purpose!

Kristi Bowman