quotations about the present
Our "now" has become at once more unforgivingly brief and unprecedentedly elastic.... This is a function, in large part, of the Rewind button. And we would all of us, to some extent, wish to be in heavy rotation. And as this capacity for recall (and recommodification) grows more universal, history itself is seen to be even more obviously a construct, subject to revision. If it has been our business, as a species, to dam the flow of time through the creation and maintenance of mechanisms of external memory, what will we become when all these mechanisms, as they now seem intended ultimately to do, merge? The end-point of human culture may well be a single moment of effectively endless duration, an infinite digital Now.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Distrust That Particular Flavor
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
Wisely improve the Present. It is thine.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Hyperion
The greatest and most active part of mankind has never hitherto been well contented with the present.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
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
The Now, that indivisible point which studs the length of infinite line
Whose ends are nowhere, is thine all, the puny all thou callest thine.
RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON
The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi
Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves -- slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.
THICH NHAT HANH
The Miracle of Mindfulness