Quotes About Present

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

That's the lesson of the dogs, that it's important to both live in the moment and then go on to the next wonderful thing.

He had to do what He did (redeem) that you might have what He is (life). Here is the "much more" of your salvation: Christ in the present tense! Not what He was—that would condemn you. And not just what He will be—that would only tantalize you. But He gives you all the overwhelming adequacy of all that He is right now for every step of the way and for every bend in the road.

The corpses in the wasteland of past and present haunt us. We are still in Eliot's land of the dead, imprisoned in Kafka's penal colony, running from the unexplained rage of the golem, listening to Lovecraft's drumbeat of horror, and shivering in the chilly shadow of Grau and Murnau's Nosferatu. We cannot awaken from history.

Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present.

The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.

Anxiety is fear about what may happen in the future, and it occurs only when the mind is imagining what the future may bring. But when your attention is on the here and now, the actions which need to be done in the present have their best chance of being successfully accomplished, and as a result the future will become the best possible present. So

Concentration is the act of focusing one's attention. As the mind is allowed to focus on a single object, it stills. As the mind is kept in the present, it becomes calm. Concentration means keeping the mind now and here. Concentration is the supreme art because no art can be achieved without it, while with it, anything can be achieved.

Fear, which is probably the biggest obstacle to any learning process, is a repressive force. It exists in the mind, and almost always it is based on something that might happen in the future, rather than what is happening now. As

Again focus your attention on the can; then let the serve serve itself.

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.

We live here. We lie in the Present's unopened Sorrow; its limits are what we are. The prisoner ought never to pardon his cell.

You already gave me forever, Aislinn. I'm asking for a chance at right now.

Whenever you give someone a present or sing a holiday song, you're helping Santa Claus. To me, that's what Christmas is all about. Helping Santa Claus!

You might be a redneck if your favorite Christmas present was a painting on black velvet.

My nearest and dearest have always been very careful. I've never had to send Christmas present back yet.

I am the worst at keeping secrets. I am the kind of person that the second I buy someone a Christmas present, I tell them what I bought them. I don't wait until Christmas. I'm not good at it.

Always now - just now - come into being. Always now - just now - give yourself to death. Practicing this is Zen practice.

We can what-if ourselves to death... But what-if never does anybody any good. All any of us ever have...is one thing, and we better make the most of it while we can: What is.

Begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it were the only one we had.

Zen is nothing more than adhering to such simple tasks, with full attention.

We truly live only one day at a time. It doesn't really help to worry about the future, which we can't control, or the past, which we can't change.

Like everyone else, evangelicals have a right to present arguments on all the issues, but the moment we present them as part of some "Christian" platform we abandon our moral high ground.