Quotes About Present

You want to dance with life, not race out ahead of life.

People who race out ahead of life are falling down on the dance floor. They are living in their own future, which is where fear lives. But when you slow down to master this present moment, life gets fearless.

do everything right on the spot—don't put anything unnecessarily into your future

It's amazing what can be done by people who learn to relax, pay attention, and focus, appreciating the present hour and all the opportunity it contains. It is said that in America we try to cultivate an appreciation of art, while the Japanese cultivate the art of appreciation. You, too, can cultivate the art of appreciation. Appreciate this hour. This hour, right now, is pure opportunity.

do everything right on the spot—don't put anything unnecessarily into your future. Do it now, so that the future is always wide open.

We habitually act out of … thoughts and assumptions – most of which we're only vaguely aware of – rather than out of full engagement with the moment.

The buddha-dharma … is about directly seeing Truth, prior to forming any ideas about it. It is about responding to each particular situation as it comes … , not according to some … program of dos and don'ts.

Porque el único modo de explorar efectivamente el futuro es entender el presente por completo.

If you saw her in these moments, you might think she was collecting her thoughts in order to go forward. But I see it another way: Her mind is being overwhelmed by two processes that must simultaneously proceed at full steam. One is to deal with and live in the present world. The other is to re-experience and mourn something that happened long ago. It is as though her lightness pulls her toward heaven, but the extra gravity around her keeps her earthbound.

Het is niet eenvoudig contact te krijgen met het leven dat je wenst en te leren hoe je je dromen in het heden kunt verwezenlijken, omdat het menselijke verstand de ene na de andere val laat dichtklappen en de ene na de andere hindernis opwerpt

Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations.

The "I/here/nowness" of consciousness itself is an aspect of self that transcends any particular content of awareness—it is the context of verbal knowing itself.

Ancient history is always colliding with the present in the most literal sense: our genes, our language, our culture all stamp the present moment with the imprint of the distant past.

But the easiest way to live in the moment is to put yourself in a situation where there's no other choice.

After three decades of research, Zimbardo found that the healthiest, happiest, highest performers blend the best of both worlds. The optimal time perspective combines the energy, joy, and openness of Presents, with the strength, fortitude, and long-term vision of the Futures.

Most of our fears and most of our anxieties don't exist in the present

And for flow junkies who get their fix through action sports, this has always been the dark secret. Ecstasis only arises when attention is fully focused in the present moment.

There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow.

As one becomes aware of the decline of violence, the world begins to look different. The past seems less innocent; the present less sinister.

Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future. Those with happy but meaningless lives are takers and beneficiaries; those with meaningful but unhappy lives are givers and benefactors.

But our intuitive conception of time differs from the ceaseless cosmic stream envisioned by Newton and Kant. To begin with, our experience of the present is not an infinitesimal instant. Instead it embraces some minimum duration, a moving window on life in which we apprehend not just the instantaneous now but a bit of the recent past and a bit of the impending future.

If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be—you didn't know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you'd be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman—if you had to choose blindly what moment you'd want to be born, you'd choose now. —Barack Obama, 2016 CHAPTER 4 PROGRESSOPHOBIA

Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future.

In a survey of historical memory, I asked a hundred Internet users to write down as many wars as they could remember in five minutes. The responses were heavily weighted toward the world wars, wars fought by the United States, and wars close to the present. Though the earlier centuries, as we shall see, had far more wars, people remembered more wars from the recent centuries.