Great Throughts Treasury

"I consider the sufferings of the present to be as nothing, compared with the glory to be revealed within us." - Saint Paul, aka The Apostle Paul, Paul the Apostle or Saul of Tarsus NULL

"External objects present us only with appearances." - Plotinus NULL

"Whoever can turn his weeping eyes to heaven has lost nothing; for there, above, is everything he an wish for here below. He only is a loser, who persists in looking down on the narrow plains of the present time." -

"Moral disarmament is to safe-guard the future; material disarmament is to save the present, that there may be a future to safeguard." - Elihu Root

"Let us think only of spending the present day well. then when tomorrow shall have come, it will be called today, and then we will think about it." - John Charles Salak

"He that lays down precepts for the governing of our lives, and moderating our passions, obliges humanity not only in the present, but in all future generations." -

"The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go of the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty." -

"The true felicity of life is to be free from anxieties and perturbations; to understand and do our duties to God and man, and to enjoy the present without any serious dependence on the future." -

"Have I done anything for society? I have then done more for myself. Let that truth be always present to thy mind, and work without cessation." - William Gilmore Simms

"Fear arises from impotence of mind, and therefore is of no service to reason nor is pity, although it seems to present an appearance of piety." -

"Shame, although it is not a virtue, is nevertheless good, in so far as it shows that a desire of living uprightly is present in the man who is possessed with shame, just as pain is called good in so far as it shows that the injured part has not yet putrefied. A man, therefore, who is ashamed of what he has done, although he is sorrowful, is nevertheless more perfect than the shameless man who has no desire of living uprightly." -

"The best time to mend your ways is the present." -

"Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff

"Neither the tenuous things of the human spirit nor the gross material needs of human life can come in contact with this business enterprise [Big Business] in such a way as to deflect its course from the line of least resistance, which is the line of greatest present gain within the law." - Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen

"As it is never too soon to be good, so it is never too late to amend; I will, therefore, neither neglect the time present, nor despair of the time past. If I had been sooner good, I might perhaps have been better; if I am longer bad, I shall I am sure, be worse." - Arthur Warwick

"We are too much inclined to underrate the power of moral influence, the influence of public opinion, and the influence of the principles to which great men - the lights of the world, and of the present age - have given their sanction." - Daniel Webster

"Look at our present life circumstances, whatever they may be, as the raw material of our learning... We must stop regarding ourselves as victims of circumstances, and start to acknowledge that we are not here purely by accident. The master within is trying to help us wake up by confronting us with our current life situation, which contains all the lessons we need to learn in order to grow into more fully developed human beings." - John Welwood

"Genuine love is nurturing because it affirms our being, and thus inspires us to be more present." - John Welwood

"[Paraphrase] The commonplace is the grandest of all things; that the exceptional in any line is no finer, better or more beautiful than the usual, and that what is really wanting is not that we should possess something we have not at present, but that our eyes should be opened to see and our hearts to feel what we all have." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"When looking back at your past suffering, feel joy. They have already benefited you by atoning for your misdeeds and at present you no longer feel pain from those past misfortunes." - Avraham Yellin

"Only fools waste their present moments regretting what is over and done with. They will constantly say, “If only I hadn’t gotten involved in this venture, I wouldn’t have suffered.” “If only I would have stayed an hour longer, this would not have happened.” We are not prophets and there is no possible way to know in advance exactly what will be. Try to protect yourself from harm, but realize we can never plan for every contingency." - Mendel Zabaraz

"When performing a good deed and other people are present, imagine you are standing in a forest surrounded only by trees and flowers. In the long run there is no difference between the two situations. Just as the trees have no awareness of what you are doing, so too in the long run it does not make a difference what those people thought about you for the few seconds they saw you." - Alexander Ziskind Maimon

"We are always looking for pleasure, frantically seeking happiness in many ways, and totally missing the simplest, most fundamental pleasure, which actually is also the greatest pleasure: just being here. When we are really present, the presence itself is made out of fullness, contentment and blissful pleasure... Happiness, value, and pleasure are not he result of anything. These qualities are part of our fundamental nature." - Ali Hameed Almaas

"Your present is... elastic to embrace infinity." - Louis K. Anspacher, fully Louis Kannan Anspacher

"Every man's life lies within the present; for the past is spent and one with, and the future is uncertain." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

"It is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone. Even this burden, too, can be lessened if you confine it strictly to its own limits." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

"Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

"At any rate it is now quite clear that neither future nor past actually exists. Nor is it right to say that there are times, past, present and future. Perhaps it would be more correct to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future. For these three exist in the mind, and I find them nowhere else: the present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of things future is expectation." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"If we conceive of some point of time which cannot be divided into even the minutes parts of moments, that is the only point that can be called present: and that point flees at such lightning speed from being future to being past, that it has no extent of duration at all." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"Our life is always absolute: that’s all there is. The truth is not somewhere else. But we have minds that are trying to burn the past or the future. The living present - Buddhahood - is rarely encountered." - Charlotte Joko Beck

"If I am faithful to the duties of the present, God will provide for the future." - William Bedell

"In that continuity of becoming which is reality itself, the present moment is constituted by the quasi-instantaneous section effected by our perception in the flowing mass; and this section is precisely that which we call the material world. Our bodies occupies its centre; it is, in this material world, that part of which we directly feel the flux; in its actual state the actuality of our present lies." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

"You define the present in an arbitrary manner as that which is, whereas the present is simply what is being made. Nothing is less than the present moment, if you understand by that the indivisible limit which divides the past from the future. When we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet; and when we think it as existing, it is already past." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

"It calls in my spirits, composes my thoughts, delights my ear, recreates my mind, and so not only fits me for after business, but fills my heart, at the present, with pure and useful thoughts; so that when the music sounds the sweetliest in my ears, truth commonly flows the clearest into my mind." - William Beveridge

"That God is eternal, is agreed by all who possess reason. What then is eternity?... Eternity is the complete and simultaneous possession of endless life in a single whole... God lives ever in an eternal present, his knowledge transcends all movement of time, and abides in the indivisibility of his present; he grasps the past and the future in all their infinite extent, and with his indivisible cognition he contemplates all events as if they were even now taking place." - Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL

"There is nothing can equal the tender hours when life is first in bloom, when the heart like a bee, in a wild of flowers, finds everywhere perfume; when the present is all and it questions not if those flowers shall pass away, but pleased with its own delightful lot, dreams never of decay." - Henry George Bohn

"Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future." - Jean de La Bruyère

"Children have neither past nor future; and that which seldom happens to us; they rejoice in the present." - Jean de La Bruyère

"As we age, the mystery of Time more and more dominates the mind. We live less in the present, which no longer has the solidity that it had in youth; less in the future, for the future every day narrows its span. The abiding things lie in the past." -

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment." -

"No reproach is like that we clothe in a smile, and present with a bow." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"But these are foolish things to all the wise, and I love wisdom more than she loves me; my tendency to philosophize on most things, from a tyrant to a tree; but still the spouseless virgin Knowledge flies, what are we? and whence come we? what shall be our ultimate existence? What’s our present? Are questions answerless, and yet incessant." -

"We live in the present, we dream of the future, but we learn eternal truths from the past." -

"He who is false to the present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and you will see the effect when the weaving of a lifetime is unraveled." - William Ellery Channing

"My mind to me a kingdom is; such present joys therein I find, that it excels all other bliss that earth affords." - Geoffrey Chaucer

"For health and the constant enjoyment of life, give me a keen and ever present sense of humor; it is the next best thing to an abiding faith in providence." - George Barrell Cheever

"The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living." -

"We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell. To live in the future is a contradiction in terms. The future is dead, in the perfectly definite sense it is not alive." -

"I don't think we understand the importance of the present; there's nothing more important than what you are doing now." - Harold Clurman

"Faith makes the discords of the present the harmonies of the future." - Robert Collyer