Presentness Quotes & Sayings

Ever since I was fifteen, that is to say from that moment when I lost all that was left me of my childhood, from the moment when I ceased to be aware of the present and knew only the past hurrying into the future, that is to say into the abyss, ever since I became fully conscious of time I have felt old and I have wanted to live. I have run after life as though to catch time, and I have tried to live. I have run after life so much that it has always escaped me, I have run, I have never been late and never too early, and yet I have never caught up with it: it is as though I have run alongside of it.
What is life, I may be asked. For me, life is not Time; it is not this state of existence, for ever escaping us, slipping between our fingers and vanishing like a ghost as soon as you try to grasp it. For me it is, it must be, the present, presentness, plenitude. I have run after life so much that I have lost it. — Eugene Ionesco

How long your closet held a whiff of you,
Long after hangers hung austere and bare.
I would walk in and suddenly the true
Sharp sweet sweat scent controlled the air
And life was in that small still living breath.
Where are you? since so much of you is here,
Your unique odour quite ignoring death.
My hands reach out to touch, to hold what's dear
And vital in my longing empty arms.
But other clothes fill up the space, your space,
And scent on scent send out strange false alarms.
Not of your odour there is not a trace.
But something unexpected still breaks through
The goneness to the presentness of you. — Madeleine L'Engle

True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is lived in the past. — Martin Buber

Breakfast alone by gaslight is about as ghastly as champagne in daylight. — Jessie Douglas Kerruish

The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past. — Susan Sontag

If you always been my enemy, it's still that way. — Suge Knight

CRAIG DAVIDSON Medium Tough — Jennifer Egan

Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment. — Robert D. Kaplan

Lovely is admirable. — Lailah Gifty Akita

My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer ... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine. — Walter Kirn

Michael tried to focus, but he found himself consumed by his past, by the memories he had tried to silence. — Brittney Sahin

The importance of setting a date, as in choosing a colour, is a matter of selection. Orange may be seen equally well as 'the decline and fall of red' or 'the rise and triumph of yellow'. — Donald Thomas

Whatever you listen to...will determine your future conversation — Dr Lloyd Magangeni

No matter where we are, God is as close as a prayer. He is our support and our strength. He will help us make our way up again from whatever depths we have fallen. — Billy Graham

I am proud to be Italian because I was born in Italy, I grew up in Italy, I went to school in Italy and I have worked in Italy. I'm Italian. — Mario Balotelli

We are not a religious tradition with a creed, but a religious movement that has always wedded social justice work to theology — James Luther Adams

We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness. — John Fowles

These bizarre examples attempt to prove one conceptual point or another by deliberately reducing all but one underappreciated feature of some phenomenon to zero, so that what really counts can shine through. The twin earth example sets internal similarity to a maximum (you are whisked off to Twin Earth without being given a chance to register this huge shift) so that external context can be demonstrated to be responsible for whatever our intuition tells us. — Daniel C. Dennett

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning. — Maya Angelou

When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness . — Charles Sanders Peirce

A magic realm of timelessness had been inserted into time, an intensity of newness and presentness, of the sort usually devoured by past and future. Suddenly, wonderfully, I fount myself exempted from the nagging pressures of past and future and savoring the infinite gift of a complete and perfect now. — Oliver Sacks