Present Quotes

“To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“I know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you know is meant to be, not what could be, not what should be, not what ought to be, not what once was.
Only the is.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Lust & Wonder

“Yesterday is a cancelled check; tomorrow is a promissory note; today is the only cash you have - so spend it wisely.”
― Kay Lyons Stockham

“If you have ever felt hopeless hang on The night you’re enduring may seem long but there is joy coming in the morning. Incredible changes are going to take place in your life as you begin to relinquish your past and renew your present.”
― Sue Augustine, When Your Past Is Hurting Your Present: Getting Beyond Fears That Hold You Back

“The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

“People from the past, have a tendency to walk back into the present, and run over the future.”
― Anthony Liccione

“Of this I am certain, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn't change the past. The past was set and sealed.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time, which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which [God] has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity or with the Present--either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“The present grows within the boundaries of the past.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.”
― Andre Breton

“Stay present for the “now” of your life. It’s your “point of power.”
― Doug Dillon

“Have you noticed," she asked him, "how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Magic

“Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space. Without the neurons to create a virtual perception of the past and the future based on all our experiences, there is no actual existence of the past and the future. All that there is, is the present.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost

“Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg

“A man is a fool to live in hopes of a better tomorrow. I have a thousand, better ways today to spend what time remains ahead of me, and I have brighter, lighter and more pleasant places in which to spend it.”
― Jack Whyte, Uther

“And it is clear to Evan, now: the difference between what is and what has been done; the present and the past. He sees that what he does and who he is isn't based on the past unless he wants it to be... No. That is the past, which has been seen differently through many different eyes and has become hazy and unclear, like a pond when stirred with a stick. Only the present moment is clear and free from prejudice.”
― Garth Stein, How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets

“Le passé et le présent sont deux statues incomplètes: l'une a été retirée toute mutilée du débris des âges, l'autre n'a pas encore reçu sa perfection de l'avenir.”
― François-René de Chateaubriand, René

“We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Western civilization places so much emphasis on the idea of hope that we sacrifice the present moment. Hope is for the future. It cannot help us discover joy, peace, or enlightenment in the present moment.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life. The past is history. The future is mysterious. Then tomorrow—this starts all over again.”
― Kat Lahr, Parallelism Of Cyclicality

“Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“That's all anyone has, and it's always brief, although, of course, some people believe they have a past where they can accumulate things and a future where they will accumulate still more. By the way, speaking of the present moment, do you masturbate a lot?”
― Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

“Sometimes it doesn't matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn't matter that it's night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It's not that time stops or that it hasn't started. This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“It was a limitation of human consciousness: We live only in the future and past, we cannot perceive now. Now occupies no space, a hypothetical gap between future and past. Only an exceptional few could feel now athletes and jazzmen and, yes, thieves...”
― William Landay, The Strangler: A Novel

“He uses our past to positively affect our present and secure our future.”
― Evinda Lepins

“The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time