The Present Quotes
The great secret about goals and visions is not the future they describe but the change in the present they engender.
What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.
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.
A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.
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.
An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.
To live in the present, we must deeply believe that what is most important is in the here and now.
At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side, are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified.
Everything flows with much greater ease when people live as one with the present moment.
But the present life should never be hated, except insofar as it subjects us to sin, although even that hatred should not properly be applied to life itself.
We can learn not to keep situations or events alive in our minds, but to return our attention continuously to the pristine, timeless present moment rather than be caught up in mental movie making.
Sugar is gone; silk has gone; iron is threatened; wool is threatened; cotton will go! How long are you going to stand it? At the present moment these industries...are like sheep in a field.
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.
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.
Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. … The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world.
As youth lives in the future, so the adult lives in the past: No one rightly knows how to live in the present.
Projecting into the future with hopes, dreams and desires can never fulfill you. Only the present moment can fulfill you.
One of the sweet and expectable aspects of life afloat is the perpetual present moment one lives in and a perception that time is nothing more than the current, an eternal flowing back to the sea.
Living intensely each present day means letting Christ dwell within you. His words are so clear: Today I would like to enter your home.
The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.
There is a single thread of attitude, a single direction of flow, that joins our present time to it's early burgeoning in Mediterranean civilization...
There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.
Don't live in the past, don't ponder about the future, stay at the PRESENT moment NOW...always.
Anyone who believes that men are the equal of women has never seen a man trying to wrap a Christmas present.
The devotion which God sends to the succor of His Church and of the nations at the present time is the devotion to the Most Holy Eucharist. It is the highest of all devotions.
The truth brings the past into the present and prepares us for the future. That's what truth does
The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable.
Peace and abstinence from European interferences are our objects, and so will continue while the present order of things in America remain uninterrupted.
The present moment is the substance with which the future is made. Therefore, the best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment. What else can you do?
When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.
The present grows within the boundaries of the past.
Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.
Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.
My biggest hero, Gregory Peck, was my birthday present on April 14, 1973. I just sat and stared at him.
