PRESENT QUOTES V

quotations about the present

The greatest and most active part of mankind has never hitherto been well contented with the present.

THOMAS HOBBES

Leviathan

Tags: Thomas Hobbes


Wisely improve the Present. It is thine.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Hyperion

Tags: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems--but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

Midnight's Children

Tags: Salman Rushdie


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


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


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


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