PRESENT QUOTES V

quotations about the present

Let us attend to the present, and as to the future, we shall know how to manage when the occasion arrives.

PIERRE CORNEILLE

attributed, Day's Collacon

Tags: Pierre Corneille


Wisely improve the Present. It is thine.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Hyperion

Tags: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward--toward what?

LAINI TAYLOR

Dreams of Gods & Monsters


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

The Miracle of Mindfulness

Tags: Thich Nhat Hanh


Our "now" has become at once more unforgivingly brief and unprecedentedly elastic.... This is a function, in large part, of the Rewind button. And we would all of us, to some extent, wish to be in heavy rotation. And as this capacity for recall (and recommodification) grows more universal, history itself is seen to be even more obviously a construct, subject to revision. If it has been our business, as a species, to dam the flow of time through the creation and maintenance of mechanisms of external memory, what will we become when all these mechanisms, as they now seem intended ultimately to do, merge? The end-point of human culture may well be a single moment of effectively endless duration, an infinite digital Now.

WILLIAM GIBSON

Distrust That Particular Flavor

Tags: William Gibson


The Now, that indivisible point which studs the length of infinite line
Whose ends are nowhere, is thine all, the puny all thou callest thine.

RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON

The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi


Under the sublime law of progress, the present outgrows the past. The great heart of humanity is heaving with the hopes of a brighter day. All the higher instincts of our nature prophesy its approach; and the best intellects of the race are struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfilment.

HORACE MANN

A Few Thoughts for a Young Man

Tags: Horace Mann