Quotes About Present

Just think about today. Think about things that have happened. Especially about good things that have happened.

Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.

There is no tomorrow, only a string of todays. Still

Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.

Live slow enough and there is only the beginning of time.

Take life one day at a time, and make each day better than the last.

That's the most basic truth the young could impose on the old--the immorality of spending now and charging it to Junior. Next time Obama tells Joe the Plumber he wants to spread the wealth around, it should be pointed out that you can't spend it until you've earned it. Redistribution from the future to the present is a crock, and if you happen to have been assigned to the future half of that equation, you should be merciless in your contempt for the present-tensers who've done that to you.

Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment.

The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of colour patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated.

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

But the augenblick isn't going to verweile. You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless.

Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now." —Annie Dillard

Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.

The Polyphemus moth never made it to the past; it crawls in that crowded, pellucid pool at the lip of the great waterfall. It is as present as this blue desk and brazen lamp, as this blackened window before me.

Lick a finger: feel the now.

Times like this become memories almost instantly, part of a gilded past that somehow coexists with the present. Remember whens to look back on even as they are happening, bittersweet and aglow with sunshine fading to sepia—the late September dust suspended in the wake of a passing car, leafy smell in the air, blue sky reflected in his sunglasses.

WE ALMOST NEVER think of the present, and when we do, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future.1 These are Pascal's words, and it is easy to see how perceptive he was about the virtual nonexistence of the present, consumed as we are by using the past to plan what-comes-next, a moment away or in the distant future. That

I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless...

It had neither memories of the past nor hope for the future.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live." —BORIS PASTERNAK

Yesterday is but a dream, And tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, And every tomorrow a vision of hope. —

All too often, the security of a mediocre present is more comfortable than the adventure of trying to be more in the future.

Yesterday is but a dream, And tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, And every tomorrow a vision of hope. —K?LID?SA, Sanskrit dramatist

Yesterday is but a dream, And tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, And every tomorrow a vision of hope. —K?LID?SA, Sanskrit dramatist and poet, ca. fifth century CE