Present Quotes

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.”
― Bill Keane

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.”
― Mother Theresa

“The future depends on what you do today.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.”
― Gautama Buddha, Sayings of Buddha

“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

“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.”
― Nikola Tesla

“The future starts today, not tomorrow.”
― Pope John Paul II

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“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 past is a ghost, the future a dream and all we ever have is now.”
― Bill Cosby

“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.”
― Martha Graham

“For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.”
― Golda Meir, My Life

“Stop longing. You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand

“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, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“I had my chance.' He said it, retiring from a lifetime of wanting. 'I had my chance, and sometimes in life, there are no second chances. You look at what you have, not what you miss, and you move forward.”
― Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

“I met a boy whose eyes showed me that the past, present and future were all the same thing.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth

“Yesterday is history,
tomorrow is a mystery,
and today is a gift...
that's why they call it present”
― Kung Fu Panda

“How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.”
― Louis L'Amour

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
― Albert Einstein

“But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until — later of sooner — perhaps — no, not perhaps — quite certainly: it will come.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“Some people live as though they are already dead. There are people moving around us who are consumed by their past, terrified of their future, and stuck in their anger and jealousy. They are not alive; they are just walking corpses.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment

“Even when you’d lost everything you thought there was to lose, somebody came along and gave you something for free.”
― Jenny Valentine, Broken Soup