Top 98 We Live In The Present Quotes
#1. Stephen Schlesinger's Act of Creation tells a dazzling story of the dramatic events that have shaped the world in which we live. Never has a book been more relevant to present dangers and future hopes.
James Chace
#2. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#3. 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
#4. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we made today.
Henry Ford
#5. The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
Alan Watts
#6. Divination is the quest to understand more about the past, present, and future. In other words, Tarot readings are an attempt to understand ourselves better and discover how we might live better in the future.
Theresa Cheung
#7. We do not yet have the solutions to these questions, but the awareness that we live in an endangered world is present in more and more life situations.
Ulrich Beck
#8. It is the individual voice, present to itself, that needs to be heard. We need to hear the process of the musician working on himself. We don't need to hear who is more clever with synthesizers. Our cleverness has created the world we live in, which in many ways, we're sorry about.
Keith Jarrett
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. The present is an age of talkers, and not doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements.
William Hazlitt
#12. We live not in our moments or our years:
The present we fling from us like the rind
Of some sweet future, which we after find
Bitter to taste.
Richard Chenevix Trench
#13. Grady felt a chill echo, the kind that comes when, in an original situation, one has the sensation of its all having occurred before: if we know the past, and live the present, is it possible that we dream the future?
Truman Capote
#14. The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.
Rollo May
#15. Because of the past, so many people are living in the past! No one is free from the past, but we are free to choose to move from the past into the present or stay in the past, though we live in the present!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#16. 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.
#17. We are never aware of the present; each instant of living becomes perceptible only when it is past, so that in a sense we do not live at all, but only remember living.
Rose Wilder Lane
#18. The "self-actualization" philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will.
David Graeber
#19. There is no such word as 'too late,' in the wide world - nay, not in the universe. What! shall we, whose atom of time is but a fragment out of an ever-present eternity - shall we, so long as we live, or even at our life's ending, dare to cry out to the Eternal One, 'It is too late!'
Dinah
#20. We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
R.D. Laing
#21. To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.
Edmund Burke
#22. Today it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent.
Simone Weil
#23. To be honest, we live in an exciting time where form is concerned. My sincerest hope is that more people will notice this and agree to play and invent - the only way to not succumb to the complacency and market-driven schlock of the present tense is to continually interrogate it from the inside out.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#24. We become free by transforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present, who are aware of our past and are thus able to live with it.
Alice Miller
#25. We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.
P.D. James
#27. Conditioned Awareness is where we live our lives in guilt over the past and anxiety over the future and never get to experience the present.
Russell Targ
#28. We must overthrow the material and moral conditions of our present-day life ... We must first purify our atmosphere and completely transform the milieu in which we live; for it corrupts our instinct and our will, and constricts our heart and our intelligence
Mikhail Bakunin
#29. Very strange is this quality of our human nature which decrees that unless we feel a future before us we do not live completely in the present.
Phillips Brooks
#30. Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.
Emil Cioran
#31. True wizards are not bound by (time); we live in the past, present and future all at once.
Deepak Chopra
#32. Any joy, creativity or wisdom our next moment brings will ensue from the way we live our present one.
Susan L. Taylor
#33. Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.
Louis L'Amour
#34. 'Crash' is a metaphor for what I see as the dehumanizing elements that are present in the world in which we live. We're distanced by the nature of the society we inhabit from a normal human reaction.
J.G. Ballard
#35. In order to change it is important to know who you are, what you believe, and how you became that person. Only then can we live more comfortably in the present and cease unconscious reactions that result in undesired outcomes.
Paula Heller Garland
#36. Discard everything except these few truths: we can live only in the present moment, in this brief now; all the rest of our life is dead and buried or shrouded in uncertainty. Short is the life we lead, and small our patch of earth.
Marcus Aurelius
#37. The past is over; the present is fleeting; we live in the future.
Ray Kurzweil
#38. The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.
Yukio Mishima
#39. Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#40. Our task - and the task of all education - is to understand the present world, the world in which we live and make our choices.
E.F. Schumacher
#41. We cannot let go of the past enough to live in the present unless we are able to grieve our losses. We must deeply feel our emotional pain in order to accept that what is happening is not what we wanted. pg 155
John Kuypers
#42. I would like people to live in the present with eternity in mind. If there is, in fact, going to be rapture one day, in which we leave everything behind, shouldn't that loosen our grip on our material possessions right now?
Robert Jeffress
#43. The atheist risk everything for the present and the future, on the basis of a belief that we are uncaused by any intelligent being. We just happen to be here. That one is willing to live and die in that belief is a very high price to pay for conjecture.
Ravi Zacharias
#44. In this world, all
men, women, and kings
must live for the present. We can only live for the future for God
Alexandre Dumas
#45. Many of us seem to live our lives looking for happiness. That is not always a bad thing, but it can be if we continually believe that happiness is someplace else and not in the present.
Barbara Barrington Jones
#46. Independence is an important, even vital, value and achievement. The problem is, we live in an interdependent reality, and our most important accomplishments require interdependency skills well beyond our present abilities.
Stephen R. Covey
#47. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.
Tim Parks
#48. We try to live every moment like that, dwelling peacefully in the present moment, and respond to events with compassion.
Nhat Hanh
#49. I don't think we ever really live in the present; instead, we're either just this side of the past or future, wavering anxiously between anticipation and recollection. That's where I lived my life, always wanting, longing, wishing.
Jonathan Hull
#50. We cannot change or put right the past, it is our choice whether to be happy in this very moment. The present is all we have and problems only live in the past or the future.
Kate Skylark
#51. We must do what we can to reduce, not increase, tensions. We must do what we can to present only the facts as we know them, not as we imagine them to be. We must learn to live with crisis in an age which calls for cool heads and accurate appraisals.
Percy Spender
#52. Have you noticed," she asked him, "how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?
Mary Balogh
#53. Many of us delude ourselves with the thought that if we could stand in the lot of our more fortunate neighbor, we could live better, happier and more useful lives ... It is my experience that unless we can succeed in our present position, we could not succeed in any other.
Helen Keller
#54. What an infernal set of fools those schoolmarms must be! Well, if in order to please men they wish to live on air, let them. The sooner the present generation of women dies out, the better. We have idiots enough in the world now without such women propagating any more.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#55. A historical perspective can also help free us from the ever-present danger
especially at danger in the social sciences
of absolutizing a theory or method which is actually relative to the fact that we live at a given moment in time in the development of our particular culture.
Rollo May
#56. We all think that in the future, we are wonderful people. We will be patient, we will not procrastinate, we will exercise, we will eat well ... The problem is we never get to live in that future. We always live in the present.
Dan Ariely
#57. The art of life is to live in the present moment and to make that moment as perfect as we can by the realization that we are the instruments and expression of God himself.
Emmet Fox
#58. Ninety percent of the population spends time imagining their future and forgetting that now is where we live and breathe. The ten percent who live in the present are the ones who have the stories to tell, the ones who live life the way it's meant to be lived.
Everly Drummond
#59. We live in the future. Even the happiness of the present is made up mostly of that delightful discontent which the hope of better things inspires.
J.G. Holland
#60. All we have is now, this moment. If you live in the future, you'll miss things, right here, right now, and you'll regret it later.
Jessica Therrien
#61. We live in the present, we dream of the future and we learn eternal truths from the past.
Chiang Kai-shek
#62. The only living life is in the past and future - the present is an interlude - strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness that we are living.
Eugene O'Neill
#63. We live in an emotionally fragile culture. We are in touch with every hurt past, present, and perceived. We are the walking wounded, and we want everyone to know.
Kevin DeYoung
#64. Each moment is magical, precious and complete and will never exist again. We forget that now is the moment we are in, that the next one isn't guaranteed. And if we are blessed with another moment, any joy, creativity or wisdom it brings will ensue from the way we live in the present one.
Susan L. Taylor
#65. What we are left with then is the present, the only time where miracles happen. We place the past and the future as well into the hands of God. The biblical statement that "time shall be no more" means that we will one day live fully in the present, without obsessing about past or future.
Marianne Williamson
#66. To live in the present, we must deeply believe that what is most important is in the here and now.
Henri Nouwen
#67. Live your passion through your heart center. Be present and centered in it when you express and do the things you love, and the right people will find you. When we do what we love doing, the rest of the world that loves what it's doing finds us.
Floris De Clercq
#68. Every life has a purpose. We need to let go of the past. Live in the present. Do not waste today worrying about what will happen tomorrow. Embrace your true spirit, embrace and listen to grace and you be transformed in the moment. Do not fixate on what you want but give thanks for what you have.
Caroline Myss
#69. We live lives of illusion and miss the incredible reality that exists in every present moment.
Marshall Stern
#70. Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present. Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have made.
Bill Watterson
#71. The extraction of deep wisdom can be done at any age, and if we are to love the time of our life, it must be. Imbedded within us is the deeper story we came to live, and the core issue at every age for any awakened human being is the extent to which we are living that story in the present moment.
Carolyn Baker
#72. Now is the only time we have, and the only time we have any control over.
Richard Carlson
#73. It is easy to be mindless in America, because dreaming of and living for a better tomorrow is the American way ... The problem is, in the second half of the twentieth century, we have gotten so good at living for tomorrow that most of us spend very little time in the present.
Barbara De Angelis
#74. I love how pop culture shapes a generation. The trends, fashion and events all play a key part in how we live our present lives, and will mark how we will be remembered in the future.
Connor Franta
#75. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today.
Henry Ford
#76. Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don't want to believe it.
Sharon Salzberg
#77. Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.
Edith Wharton
#78. Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.
George R R Martin
#79. We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.
John Dewey
#80. If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us.
Thomas Merton
#81. We choose to live life to the fullest because it is in our best interest to do so. - Charmainism
Charmaine Smith Ladd
#82. I don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we're living now.
Paulo Coelho
#83. To a large degree, the measure of our peace of mind is determined by how much we are able to live in the present moment. Irrespective of what happened yesterday or last year, and what may or may not happen tomorrow, the present moment is where you are - always!
Richard Carlson
#84. Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.
Henry David Thoreau
#85. In this present culture, we need to find the means to work and live together with less aggression if we are to resolve the serious problems that afflict and impede us.
Margaret J. Wheatley
#86. Our present moment is a mystery that we are part of. Here and now is where all the wonder of life lies hidden. And make no mistake about it, to strive to live completely in the present is to strive for what already is the case.
Wayne Dyer
#87. I call this the Relativistic Weekend Effect. We live in the present, but our happiness relies heavily on the future. Our mood is as much expectation as experience.
Hugh Howey
#88. We spend our lives telling ourselves the story of past and future, while the reality of the present goes largely unexplored. Now we live in ignorance of the freedom and simplicity of consciousness, prior to the arising of thought.
Sam Harris
#89. The chief contribution of such a radically new and more powerful instrument would be, not to supplement our present ideas of the universe we live in, but rather to uncover new phenomena not yet imagined, and perhaps modify profoundly our basic concepts of space and time.
Lyman Spitzer
#90. The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#91. In order to live in the present, we have to learn how to feel safe even when a situation feels threatening to us.
John Kuypers
#92. We cannot live in the past; it is gone. Nor can we live in the future; it is forever beyond our grasp. We can live only in the present. If we are unaware of our present actions, we are condemned to repeating the mistakes of the past and can never succeed in attaining our dreams for the future.
S. N. Goenka
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. The challenge for each of us is to find out who we are and to live our way into our own calling.we do this by paying close attention to all aspects of life as they unfold in the present moment.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#96. We dream of the future, to distract ourselves from the present, in order to forget the past.
Heal the past, live in the present and don't rush to the future. Life is a journey and it will all be over before you know it.
L.J. Vanier
#97. He looked me directly in the eye. 'So you live in America?'
'We do.' I smiled.
He stopped, opened his backpack, pulled out an empty tear gas grenade and handed it to me.
'I believe it was a present from your country.' Majid smiled. 'Tell your friends thanks. We got their grenade.
Michelle Cohen Corasanti
#98. Everyone has a messed-up family to one extent or another but we all have an obligation to rise above it. Live in the present and stop sniveling about the past.
Emily Giffin
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