quotations about the present
Let us act as though there were no past, only so far as it aids and cheers the present; and no future, excepting such as we make it by the best use of the present.
MARTHA MARTELL
Second Love
Stop longing. You poison today's ease, reaching always for tomorrow.
ROBIN HOBB
Fool's Errand
One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
GOLDA MEIR
My Life
The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.
EUGENE O'NEILL
Long Day's Journey Into Night
We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we're always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better, about the consequences of our actions, and about why we didn't act as we should have. Or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do tomorrow, what precautions we should take, what dangers await us around the next corner, how to avoid what we don't want and how to get what we have always dreamed of.
PAULO COELHO
Aleph
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.
BILL KEANE
attributed, Dictionary of Proverbs
A thin present issues from a thin, sketchy, rudimentary relation with the future--one that has not much structure to it.
ERMANNO BENCIVENGA
Dancing Souls
There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Galileo's Dream
Look upon every day, O youth, as the whole of life, not merely as a section, and enjoy the present without wishing through haste to spring on to another.
JEAN PAUL
attributed, Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
ALBERT CAMUS
Notebooks: 1935-1942
Now seems pretty specious to me ... for it's just a hole, a little hole on whose rim we've been allowed, for an eye's blink, to perch, watching that flow ... in which the future hisses through to heap the potter's field of the past.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren
The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present.
MARTIN AMIS
Money
Past and to come seems best; things present, worst.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry IV, Part 2
There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward--toward what?
LAINI TAYLOR
Dreams of Gods & Monsters
How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.
AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
Confessions
The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Conquest of Happiness
Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Under the sublime law of progress, the present outgrows the past. The great heart of humanity is heaving with the hopes of a brighter day. All the higher instincts of our nature prophesy its approach; and the best intellects of the race are struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfilment.
HORACE MANN
A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Plague of Doves
Let us attend to the present, and as to the future, we shall know how to manage when the occasion arrives.
PIERRE CORNEILLE
attributed, Day's Collacon