Past Present Future Tense Quotes & Sayings

Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something so slack and almost fearful in her too frequent smile, so that when you saw Mignon being happy, you always thought: "It can't last." She had the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet she existed thus, without memory or history, only because her past was too bleak to think of and her future too terrible to contemplate; she was the broken blossom of the present tense. — Angela Carter

Don't give up on your dream. If you do, you aren't just giving up on its present-tense reality. You're giving up on its future-tense potential. Were — Mark Batterson

Lilianna: Ask me again later.
Tate: Okay Lil'Miss. Magic 8 Ball.
Lilianna: Really, ask me again in a few weeks. I'll have a better read on the relationship in the present tense then.
Tate: You'll have a better read on the present in the future. Yeah, I think that's called History class. — H.R. Willaston

Only in the present tense is the subject married to its verb. The action - all action, past and future - comes at the end. At the very end, when there is nothing left to do but act. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Winners live in the present tense. People who come up short are consumed with future or past. I want to be living in the now. — Alex Rodriguez

People's - most people's job is talking about the future or like money not even in the present tense. It's not even paper. — Colin Quinn

Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done, is it being done, or is something to be done? Reports are now written in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense. Watch for novel uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmer), defined by the past imperfect, the present insufficient, and the future absolutely perfect. — Amrom Harry Katz

At that stage of your life, there'll be no past or future for you; until I give you my breast, you'll have no memory of contentment in the past nor expectation of relief in the future. Once you begin nursing, everything will be in reverse, and all will be right with the world. NOW is the only moment you'll perceive; you'll live in the present tense. In many ways, it's an enviable state. — Ted Chiang

Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. they dispense no thought with the calculation of risk and profit, they take no thought for the future, they're forced to spearpoint into the present tense. Thrown over a precipice, you fall or else you fly; you clutch at any hope, however unlikely; however - if I may use such an overworked word - miraculous. What we mean by that is, Against all odds. — Margaret Atwood

A money-lender
he serves you in the present tense; he lends you in the conditional mood; keeps you in the conjunctive; and ruins you in the future. — Joseph Addison

1. Resolve today to "switch on" your success mechanism and unlock your goal-achieving mechanism by deciding exactly what you really want in life. 2. Make a list of ten goals that you want to achieve in the foreseeable future. Write them down in the present tense, as if you have already achieved them. 3. Select the one goal that could have the greatest positive impact on your life if you were to achieve it, and write it down at the top of another piece of paper. 4. Make a list of everything you could do to achieve this goal, organize it by sequence and priority, and then take action on it immediately. 5. Practice mindstorming by writing out twenty ideas that could help you achieve your most important goal, and then take action on at least one of those ideas. — Brian Tracy

Hope requires a very careful symbolization. It must not be expressed too fully in the present tense because hope one can touch and handle is not likely to retain its promissory call to a new future. Hope expressed only in the present tense will no doubt be coopted by the managers of this age — Walter Brueggemann

Trust perfected is prayer perfected. Trust looks to receive the thing asked for and gets it. Trust is not a belief that God can bless or that He will bless, but that He does bless, here and now. Trust always operates in the present tense. Hope looks toward the future. Trust looks to the present. Hope expects. Trust possesses. Trust receives what prayer acquires. So, what prayer needs, at all times, is abiding and abundant trust. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Learning to live in the present tense-one that's free from the failures of the past and the anxieties of the future-is a wonderful gift, and one you always should be striving for. — Rick Pitino

Is life like this? Is it a past that goes by, then crumbles away, and a present that runs in the wake of the past, and a future that can only be grasped if one talks of it in the present or past tense? — Kahlil Gibran

Chronocanine Envy:
Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, Life must be lived forward. — Douglas Coupland

What libraries give you is all three tenses - the past tense - the present tense in which we live and the future that we can only imagine. These places have teachers who are living and dead and we are lucky to have them. If I sit here and read Aristotle, he is speaking to me across a thousand years - more than a thousand years. That sense that I am in the company of the great greatest people who ever lived is a humbling experience but a liberating experience. — Pete Hamill

Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair. — Angela Carter

Live in the present tense, facing the duty at hand without regret for the past or worry over the future. — William DeWitt Hyde

I'm focussing on what I haven't attained, not what I have. A lot has come to me early. I don't want to get consumed with that. Winners live in the present tense. People who come up short are consumed with future or past. I want to be living in the now. My goal is to play one full game in the now, but I haven't even gotten past the first inning yet. I start thinking about where my mom is or if my dogs have been fed. The average human has 2,000 thoughts a day. The really accomplished have 1,500 because you can focus longer. I need to learn how to focus longer. — Alex Rodriguez

The past is something for you to learn from and the future is something that you hope is going to happen, but I'm always speaking to my actual fans in present tense. — Katt Williams

I don't view myself from the past present or future tense i like to think of the world from my own personal point of view at whatever time i feel that is relayed to me in conjunction with my well being to progressively grow successfully finacially as well as mentally. — Riff Raff

Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't mean anything to me. I just wanted to have a hit, I just wanted to be like those people on the radio. It was all of a case of the present tense with no projecting into the future, particularly. — Art Garfunkel

Eternal life truly begins the moment you're born again. It's a present tense - not future tense - reality. If you're a believer, eternal life is now! — Andrew Wommack

Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself. — Pico Iyer

I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, and songs of love for present tense. — Mary Doria Russell

The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense. — Lex Martin

Facebook is about sharing experiences that you've had. Foursquare is more about the present tense and the future tense. — Dennis Crowley

The tense of the body is the present indicative; but the soul has a memory and a present and a future. I have conceived some extremely recondite pains for Mr. Trellis. I will pierce him with a pluperfect. — Flann O'Brien

Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European. — Mark Steyn

So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future. — Marion Coutts

I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:
The past, present, and future walk into a bar - it was tense. — Kelli Russell Agodon