quotations about the present
To stay present in everyday life, it helps to be deeply rooted within yourself; otherwise, the mind, which has incredible momentum, will drag you along like a wild river.
ECKHART TOLLE
The Power of Now
Wisely improve the Present. It is thine.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Hyperion
The greatest and most active part of mankind has never hitherto been well contented with the present.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
The Now, that indivisible point which studs the length of infinite line
Whose ends are nowhere, is thine all, the puny all thou callest thine.
RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON
The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi
Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves -- slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.
THICH NHAT HANH
The Miracle of Mindfulness
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems--but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Midnight's Children
Our "now" has become at once more unforgivingly brief and unprecedentedly elastic.... This is a function, in large part, of the Rewind button. And we would all of us, to some extent, wish to be in heavy rotation. And as this capacity for recall (and recommodification) grows more universal, history itself is seen to be even more obviously a construct, subject to revision. If it has been our business, as a species, to dam the flow of time through the creation and maintenance of mechanisms of external memory, what will we become when all these mechanisms, as they now seem intended ultimately to do, merge? The end-point of human culture may well be a single moment of effectively endless duration, an infinite digital Now.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Distrust That Particular Flavor