Present Quotes

You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

~ John Green

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

All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.

~ Martha Graham

In magic - and in life - there is only the present moment, the now. You can't measure time the way you measure the distance between two points. 'Time' doesn't pass. 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

Your hand can seize today, but not tomorrow; and thoughts of your tomorrow are nothing but desire. Don’t waste this breath, if your heart isn’t crazy, since the rest of your life won’t last forever.

~ Omar Khayyám

The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.

~ Bil Keane

All sins are forgiven once you start making a lot of money.

~ Rupaul

[T]he concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine. ... Thought and deed conjoined are crucial. ... The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; successs or failure is secondary.

~ Iain Pears

We may be living past and future lives at the same time we are living this one.

~ Doug Dillon

Nu mai trăim un prezent placid, ci suntem prinși cu toții în efortul de a ne pregăti permanent pentru viitor.

~ Jean-Claude Carrière

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.

~ Henry David Thoreau

People tend to look on the beliefs of the past as being primitive and unintelligent, yet we are seeing more truth in the past every day.

~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

What comes, when it comes, will be what it is.

~ Alberto Caeiro

The universe contains many planets which make it what it is – a unified system. In addition, our bodies contain many organs, and each part is congruent to a planet in our solar system. The universe we see out our eyes is a mirror of what is within us. This is what God meant by making man in his image. We are all made as a reflection of God and that reflection of him is within us. Furthermore, not only are all religions connected to the same Truth, or Cosmic Heart, but this concept is also mirrored in the pantheons of ancient religions, where each of the many gods simply represented one set of characteristics of the ONE. And in all cases, these many gods symbolized the planets, therefore mimicking the different parts of the universe and the ONE God’s many mirrors (He Who is All). The structure behind all polytheistic religions of the past and present is one and the same. They are all built on the same foundation as Nature.

~ Suzy Kassem

The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

THE FOUR HEAVENLY FOUNTAINSLaugh, I tell youAnd you will turn backThe hands of time.Smile, I tell youAnd you will reflectThe face of the divine.Sing, I tell youAnd all the angels will sing with you!Cry, I tell youAnd the reflections found in your pool of tears -Will remind you of the lessons of today and yesterdayTo guide you through the fears of tomorrow.

~ Suzy Kassem

He uses our past to positively affect our present and secure our future.

~ Evinda Lepins

destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time, which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which [God] has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity or with the Present--either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

~ C.s. Lewis

Le passé et le présent sont deux statues incomplètes: l'une a été retirée toute mutilée du débris des âges, l'autre n'a pas encore reçu sa perfection de l'avenir.

~ François-René De Chateaubriand

Later that day when I walked down this dried-out riverbed, enjoying the last rays of sunshine on my bare skin, I felt a deep inner peace coming up straight from my heart.

~ Nina Hrusa

Die wertvollste Reise ist die Reise zu unserem Selbst.

~ Nina Hrusa

We can accept and embrace our pasts as part of the path that shaped who we are now.

~ Amy Leigh Mercree

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

It is not as much about who you used to be, as it is about who you choose to be.

~ Sanhita Baruah

Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.

~ Hermann Hesse

I am who I am because the tears of my past have watered the magnificence of my present.

~ Steve Maraboli

We decide how much we want our past to be a part of our present.I stopped inviting the past into my life.It took the hint and stopped showing up.

~ Scott Stabile

The past, the present, the future –The floodgates of time wait for Her footsteps Yet She resides forever –In the shape of a rising dawn,In the sound of a humming bee,In the chirping of a flying bird,In the birth of a newborn,In the blissful serenity of Nature;For Happiness is but a reflection of simplicity.

~ Debatrayee Banerjee

I met a boy whose eyes showed me that the past, present and future were all the same thing.

~ Jennifer Elisabeth

A man is a fool to live in hopes of a better tomorrow. I have a thousand, better ways today to spend what time remains ahead of me, and I have brighter, lighter and more pleasant places in which to spend it.

~ Jack Whyte

Past and Present I know well; each is a friend and sometimes an enemy to me. But it is the quiet, beckoning Future, an absolute stranger, with whom I have fallen madly in love.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

If this turns to friendship, it only meansThat one of us will suffer.That when we meet after the worst of endings,There will only be this skein of words between us—Most of them for boredom, fewer for loneliness—Rising out of our mutual space of breath, leavingBehind a bluer sky each moment of departure.And one of us will cling on to its blue,Hung on partings like a muted cloud, whileThe other rides on a wing of word away from here.

~ Cyril Wong

If we can’t feel into the heart of grief, we can’t truly move on to experience hope and joy. We can’t be present to what is now, and what is next, because we are bound by the loss and sorrow that holds us to the past. Grief has to flow. It has to be carried, not just by you, but by the others with you, by your community, until it transforms to the next rightful calling of your heart to action.

~ Sharon Weil

Living in the moment works sometimes, but when alone, it clouds over your memories and dreams, and those are what I need to survive.

~ D.s. Mixell

You must have hope in a better future and have faith in this hope. But then you must forget your hope and focus on this moment now.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Lessons from the past create hope for the future and action in the present.

~ Orrin Woodward

This I would wish, that there was no time or sleep. No more past, or future, and everything we did was good the first time, for the day. Without the need of looking back to learn from the past, and no future to hope for the better. No more tiredness, or having a need to dream, and no nightmares to fear. If there was a second time, this is how I would like to start over.

~ Anthony Liccione

We should always hope and expect to see a brand new day filled with hope, love and joy.

~ Bamigboye Olurotimi

Today will die tomorrow.

~ Algernon Charles Swinburne