Quotes & Sayings About The Future Past And Present

This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for the future is offset by the "ability" to dread pain and to fear of the unknown. Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and future gives us a corresponding dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable. — Alan W. Watts

If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment. — Elif Shafak

Human migration is an important part of our ancestral story. The places we live shape us, the places we leave behind forges our history, and the places we might travel to becomes our mysterious future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Past, present and future are illusions, or to put it another way, to separate past, present, and future is an illusion.... The present is the opening in time... — Deepak Chopra

Neither bend from sorrows of the past,
Nor be anxious about future or get excited in the present.
Past, present and future are all manifested in AUM- the Self;
Which combines all three energies, Material, mental and sleep, in unison. — Gian Kumar

I remember the past, and I learn from it. I rejoice and celebrate in the present, and I re-imagine the future. Now is the moment that never ends. — Deepak Chopra

The good news is that you may have created my past and screwed up my present, but you havce no control over my future. You don't know me at all. — David Klass

One could only learn from the past and move on through the present to make a better future. — Jason Medina

You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.
It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us. — Stefan Molyneux

PAYING ATTENTION TO GOD We bless GOD, oh yes - we bless him now, we bless him always! PSALM 115:18, THE MESSAGE Prayer is the most thoroughly present act we have as humans, and the most energetic: it sockets the immediate past into the immediate future and makes a flexible, living joint of them. The Amen gathers what has just happened into the Maranatha of the about to happen and produces a Benediction. We pay attention to God and lead others to pay attention to God. It hardly matters that so many people would rather pay attention to their standards of living, or their self-image, or their zeal to make a mark in the world. The reality is God: worship or flee. THE CONTEMPLATIVE PASTOR — Eugene H. Peterson

Language is the memory of man. Without it he has no past, a paltry present, and an empty future. With it he can bring his dreams to life. — Edward R. Murrow

Learn the past, watch the present, and create the future. — Jess Conrad

We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is the present usually hurts. — Blaise Pascal

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Using the combined, integrated force of the mind and body is more efficient than using one without the other. Since the body can only exist in the present, that's where the mind should be too (unless we deliberately choose to contemplate the past or future). At the same time, the body needs to be healthy and in optimum operating condition so that it can respond effectively to the mind's directives. — H.E. Davey

Here in Turin you can write because past and future have greater prominence than the present, the force of past history and the anticipation of the future give a concreteness and sense to the discrete, ordered images of today. Turin is a city which entices the reader towards vigour, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way toward madness. — Italo Calvino

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

Reality includes both the past and the future, but existence includes only the present and is totally dependent on the reality of past and future universes. Without them there is no existence now. — Fred Alan Wolf

Some pieces will sing to your present, others may echo of your past, and the rest could whisper of your future. — Lang Leav

You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better. — Andrew Solomon

If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future. — Winston S. Churchill

When we let go of yearning for the future, preoccupation with the past, and strategies to protect the present, there is nowhere left to go but where we are. To connect with the present moment is to begin to appreciate the beauty of true simplicity. — Jack Kornfield

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future. — G. M. Trevelyan

Some people have asked if I can channel spirits. Yes, I can. Some asked me if I can access my past-lives. Yes, I can that too. Others asked me if I can predict the future. And yes, I can do that as well. However, in the few times I channeled spirits, they wrote worse books than mine. In my past-lives I wasn't as wise as I am now. And the future isn't important if I can't control the present. — Robin Sacredfire

Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another. — Aberjhani

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future. — Susan Sontag

For, I think, when I woke up today, with a dream of yesterday still in my eyes,I felt tired in life. And thinking of the little blond girl of Mays & Junes long gone by,I felt strange looking on a field of wheat, and I thought, in a moment I was God and so was she, and this field was us too. So long gone, she goes. But I am still her, whether she comes and goes like all of life, or she stays awhile.
Once, a man of physics told me, matter cannot be created or destroyed. And on
another occasion he said everything came from one point, in the beginning.
So we are all flowers and rivers and trees. That was all of us together. Every one of the past, present, and future. — Derek Keck

We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own. — Blaise Pascal

A world of "if"s, but it would make no difference. If I could go back in time ... but I couldn't. The past was behind me. The best thing now would be to stop looking over my shoulder. It was time to forget the past and look to the present and future. — Darren Shan

Joy, joy, joy!
Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers,
And the future is dark, and the present is spread,
Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

I realized that every moment in all our lives - past, present, future, known, unknown, and unknowable - exist simultaneously, as though outside of what we know as time. I became aware that I already was everything I was trying to attain, and I believe that's true for everyone. All things that we perceive as positive, negative, good, or bad, are simply parts of the perfect, balanced Whole. — Anita Moorjani

The practice of concentration is like acquiring a lampshade to help us concentrate our mind on something. While doing sitting or walking meditation, cutting the future, cutting the past, dwelling in the present time, we develop our own power of concentration. With that power of concentration, we can look deeply into the problem. This is insight meditation.
First we are aware of the problem, focusing all our attention on the problem, and then we look deeply into it in order to understand its real nature [ ... ]. — Thich Nhat Hanh

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

I believe in living in the present and making each day count. I don't pay much attention to the past or the future. — Matthew McConaughey

It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one. — George Harrison

At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past. — Haruki Murakami

The heart is a repository of emotions
real, imagined, and invented, owned and borrowed, past, present, future
and there in your chest, operating at an average of 80 beats per minute at rest, is a heart that has stories to tell. — A.A. Patawaran

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

Through imagination, we can visit the past, contemplate the present, and anticipate the future. We can also do something else of profound and unique significance. We can create. — Ken Robinson

It's harder to build than destroy. To build is to engage and change. In jazz, we call progressing harmonies changes. Changes are like obstacles on a speed course. They demand your attention and require you to be present. They are coming ... they are here ... and then they are gone. It's how life comes. Each moment is a procession from the future into the past and the sweet spot is always the present. Live in that sweet spot. Be present. — Wynton Marsalis

The cumulative weight of all mortal sins
past, present, and future
pressed upon that perfect, sinless, and sensitive Soul! All our infirmities and sicknesses were somehow, too, a part of the awful arithmetic of the Atonement. (See Alma 7:11-12; Isa. 53:3-5; Matt. 8:17.) The anguished Jesus not only pled with the Father that the hour and cup might pass from Him, but with this relevant citation. 'And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me.' (Mark 14:35-36.) — Neal A. Maxwell

I suppose that someday, suddenly, I will be transferred to another age, for example the chivalric or the bronze. The hope is, of course, that I arrive in period dress but not resemble a contemporary luminary, for I wish to simply onlook. But, more probably, thanks to chronologically garbled garb, or my mistakable face - which will lead to expectations of competence - I will have to explain my occurrence. That explained, I will have to explain my age, The Present, also known as "The Future" in the past. This is why I am studying our great inventions and advances: to be ready for questions. — Amy Leach

A daughter is the happy memories of the past, the joyful moments of the present, and the hope and promise of the future. — Bruce Barton

Ideally the ultimate retreat is to retreat from the past and the future to always remain in the present. — Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche

Words matter, especially words defining complicated political arrangements, because they shape perceptions of the events of the past, attitudes toward policies being carried out in the present, and expectations about desirable directions for the future. — Michael Mandelbaum

My point is that focusing on the past, present or future can have both positive and negative effects. Excessive worry about the future can be bad, while hopes and dreams can be good. Regret because of the past can be destructive, but learning lessons from previous events and having good memories can be great. Focusing intently on the present is usually stress-relieving and liberating, but sometimes the present moment is too sad or horrible to dwell on. — Gudjon Bergmann

Our own intellectual shortfalls and perplexities do not alter the fact of God's astonishing foreknowledge, which takes into account our choices for which we are responsible. Amid the mortal and fragmentary communiques and the breaking news of the day concerning various human conflicts, God lives in an eternal now where the past, present, and future are constantly before Him (see D&C 130:7). — Neal A. Maxwell

Those three means are Mystery, Miracle, and Prophecy. The first two are incompatible with true religion, and the third ought always to be suspected.
As mystery answered all general purposes, miracle followed as an occasional auxiliary. The former served to bewilder the mind, the latter to puzzle the senses. The one was the lingo, the other the legerdemain.
As Mystery and Miracle took charge of the past and the present, Prophecy took charge of the future, and rounded the tenses of faith. — Thomas Paine

The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future, and so, as the vitality and infinite creative potential of Being, which is inseparable from the Now, becomes covered up by time, your true nature becomes obscured by the mind. An increasingly heavy burden of time has been accumulating in the human mind. All individuals are suffering under this burden, but they also keep adding to it every moment whenever they ignore or deny that precious moment or reduce it to a means of getting to some future moment, which only exists in the mind, never in actuality. — Eckhart Tolle

You are caught in the current of unceasing change. Your life is a ripple in it. Every moment of your conscious life links the infinite past with the infinite future. Take part in both and you will not find the present empty. — Oswald Spengler

The secret of happiness lies in the lifestyle of a child who lives in present; past and future are only the grammar thing for him. — Ankit Rawat

In that moment I know exactly what I want; I want to peel away all the layers of clothing between us, strip away everything that separates us, the past and the present and the future. — Veronica Roth

But when, through the open door of the cross and the name and power of Jesus Christ, I commend myself to the Father's heart, then God cancels all my past, accepts all my present, swears His holy name for my future and the love of God take me over. Then fear goes out of my heart, because love has come in. — A.W. Tozer

The river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future. — Hermann Hesse

I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists. — Claudia Rankine

I had this crazy, a bit of a near-death experience in Estonia. I had these visions of the future but I was in this state where I felt the past, the present, and the future were all happening at the same time. — Taraka Larson

But to be a parent is to live in the past-present-future all at once. It is to hug your children and be intensely aware of how much smaller they felt last year ... even as you wonder how much bigger they will feel the next. It is to be a time-shifter, to marvel at the budding of their intellect, their verbal dexterity, their sense of humor ... at the same time rewinding and fast-forwarding ... to when they were younger, to when they'll be older. It is to experience longing for the here and now, which I know sounds flaky - sort of like complaining about being homesick when you're already home - but can happen, trust me, when you live in multiple time zones all at once. — Youngme Moon

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all. — Evelyn Waugh

I turned away from him and went on my way, up the street and about my business. The past was dead. The future was resignation, fatality, and could only end one way now. The present was numbness, that could feel nothing. Like Novocaine needled into your heart. What was there in all the dimensions of time for me? ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER) — Cornell Woolrich

When his hand came down across my bottom the first time I thought I was going to die. But the pain passed, transmuted as if my some alchemical wizardry, and for a moment I experienced a surreal satisfaction in being bent over in this way without rights or choices, past or future. In pain you are living in the present and as the pain passes there is pleasure from having endured the pain. — Chloe Thurlow

We should do nothing for revenge, but everything for security: nothing for the past; everything for the present and the future. — James A. Garfield

Mike Mason says, "A decision to rejoice in the present changes not only the present, it also changes my view of the past and ignites my future with hope."[26] I've stopped demanding that a moment last longer than it can. I don't require a moment to be anything other than what it is: a brief span of time that has been given by a gracious Father. I will wring every bit of pleasure out of this moment because I don't know when the next one will come. We're rarely satisfied with today; we spend too much time regretting the unrepeatable past and wishing we could get a do-over, or we waste our energy on worry and anxiety about the unknowable future. Either way, TODAY is ignored or minimized. — Kay Warren

My best day ever. Got up. Had breakfast. Came to school. Bored, as usual. Wishing I wasn't there, like usual. Kids ignoring me, suits me fine. Sitting with the other retards - we're so special. Wasting my time. Yesterday was the same, and it's gone, anyway. Tomorrow may never come. There is only today. This is the best day and the worst day. Actually it's crap. — Rachel Ward

When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action. — Timothy Snyder

The young should not think of themselves as immature and the elderly need not view themselves as feeble. Our minds control our bodies. Have no age, transcend both past and future, and enter into naka-ima - the eternal present. — H.E. Davey

I thank God tonight for freedom - those who bought and paid for it with their lives in the past - those who will protect it in the present and defend it in the future. — Jim Gibbons

Don't dwell too much on the past. The lessons are useful for the present and a preparation for the future. Move on! — Lailah Gifty Akita

I always live in the present. I don't know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing. — Fernando Pessoa

I don't think we ever really live in the present; instead, we're either just this side of the past or future, wavering anxiously between anticipation and recollection. That's where I lived my life, always wanting, longing, wishing. — Jonathan Hull

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', — George Orwell

It's OK to quote from your past. But I'm more interested in quoting from my present and pointing towards the future. — Robert Plant

Release the story and the truth will be revealed.
Release the past and the present will reveal itself.
Embrace the future and walk through your fears.
Dig out the weeds and the flowers will blossom.
Speak your Truth and your life will become manifest. — Miranda J. Barrett

The past cannot be redeamed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is.
To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the present and promises to be with us in the future until the end point. Only time conquers time and its burdens. There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need. — Dean Koontz

Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction
a period in which past, present, and future are rewoven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology. — Louise J. Kaplan

Ah, yes, the trusty time paradox. If I go back in time and kill my grandfather, then shall I cease to exist? I believe, as Gorben and Berndt did, that any repercussions are already being felt. We can only change the future, not the past or present. If I go back, then I have already been back.
- Artemis Fowl — Eoin Colfer

Respect the past, and prepare for the future by taking action in the present. — Rob Martin

If you read on and unlock the secrets of time travel, you could be responsible for the dissolution of every puppy that ever exists - past, present and future. And we'll tell everyone it was you. — Phil Hornshaw

For it is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor love, should make them swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Living in the moment works sometimes, but when alone, it clouds over your memories and dreams, and those are what I need to survive. — D.S. Mixell

Chasing your tale? Sometimes we relive past accomplishments, failures and or past relationships to the point of exhaustion. When we do this, I liken it to a dog chasing its tail, just spinning round and round and going nowhere fast. Constantly chasing our own tales has the same effect on us. It leaves us in a state of dizzying immobility. When we wrap our arms so firmly around our past we leave little room to embrace our present future and that, my friends, is a sad tale to tell. ~Jason Versey — Jason Versey

Tashi says nomads keep to the routines and customs they learned from their parents and they know the basic truths: that life is full of suffering, that suffering can be understood and lived through, that their actions and intentions will determine their future lives just as the past has allowed for this present life. — Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past — John Berger

I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men. — Arthur C. Clarke

Live more and more in the present, which is ever beautiful and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future. — Meher Baba

Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention. — Anthony Bourdain

An accurate knowledge of the past of a country is necessary for everyone who would understand its present, and who desires to judge of its future. — Annie Besant

And this time as the lashes come, try to think about the pain, instead of against it, because there is not one single aspect of life, past, present, or future, that does not tear your reason from you, to think on it. So think about the pain. This pain after all has its limits. You can chart its passage through your body. It has a beginning, middle, end. Imagine if it had a color. The first cut of the lash is what, red? Red, spreading into a brilliant yellow. And this one again, red, red, no yellow, and then white, white, white, white ... Why have you incarcerated yourself in this palazzo of torture chambers, why do you not leave this place? Because you are a monster and this is a school for monsters, and if you leave here, then you will be completely, completely alone! Alone with this!
Don't weep in front of these strangers. Swallow it down. Don't weep in front of these strangers! Cry to heaven, cry to heaven, cry to heaven. — Anne Rice

Teaching involves a search for meaning in the world. Teaching is a life project, a calling, a vocation that is an organizing center of all other activities. Teaching is past and future as well as present, it is background as well as foreground, it is depth as well as surface. Teaching is pain and humor, joy and anger, dreariness and epiphany. Teaching is world building, it is architecture and design, it is purpose and moral enterprise. Teaching is a way of being in the world that breaks through the boundaries of the traditional job and in the process redefines all life and teaching itself. (p. 130) — Nancy Fichtman Dana

He was becoming something the world had never seen before - a dream animal - living at least partially within a secret universe of his own creation and sharing that secret universe in his head with other, similar heads. Symbolic communication had begun. Man had escaped out of the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and future. The unseen gods, the powers behind the world of phenomenal appearance, began to stalk through his dreams. — Loren Eiseley

Time that is spent dwelling on the past will surely continue in your present moment - and the future. — Michelle Cruz-Rosado

We will never move out of the present and into the future with all God has planned for us if we cling to dwell in the past. — Sue Augustine

The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Life is divided into three parts: what was, what is and what shall be. Of these three periods, the present is short, the future is doubtful and the past alone is certain. — Seneca.

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows. — Niall Williams

All the creations of God stretch out infinitely. All times, past, present and future for all beings, worlds unimagined — Frederick Lenz

Let's forgive the past and who we were then. Let's embrace the present and who we're capable of becoming. Let's surrender the future and watch miracles unfold. — Marianne Williamson

Pick the day. Enjoy it - to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come ... The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present, and I don't want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future. — Audrey Hepburn

I have devoted my whole life to Physical Culture. I shall devote the rest too for the same. I have seen the degradation in which we are at present. I have travelled extensively and all that I have remarked here is from experience; and my suggestions are to meet the situation. I know they would, if adapted remedy the evil; for, I have studied carefully the position. If we in all seriousness wish to call ourselves the descendants of the mighty Yoddhas of past, if we wish not to cast a blot on the fair name of India, if we wish that India should have a future vying with its glorious past, if we wish that we should gain an honorable and equal place among the peoples of the world it should be our sacred resolve from now to wake up from the sleep as a lion; we should muster muscle and steel the body. For all greatness lies in Culture and 1 should only be too gratified if my scheme could put the youth of the country on the right track to achieve our most cherished Ideals. — Kodi Ramamurthy Naidu

The time and moment of Ancient and Medieval is gone, a new change is sought from within by the lifeforce a moment that is for NOW and not holding on the Past which though Primordial is eternally in the present living for the Future. — Maitreya Rudrabhayananda

In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred,It is a paryer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present. — Amelia Atwater-Rhodes