Best time is present time. [ Proverb ]
In time there is no present,
In eternity no future,
In eternity no past. [ Tennyson ]
Live this day as if the last. [ Bishop Kerr ]
Like a dart the present glances,
Silent stands the past sublime. [ Schiller ]
Trust no future, howe'er pleasant;
Let the dead past bury its dead.
Act, act in the living present;
Heart within, and God o'erhead! [ Longfellow ]
Bear the burden of the present,
Let the morrow bear its own;
If the morning sky be pleasant.
Why the coming night bemoan?
Holy strivings nerve and strengthen,
Long endurance wins the crown;
When the evening shadows lengthen,
Thou shalt lay the burden down. [ Thomas Mackellar ]
The present is great with the future. [ Leibnitz ]
Absent in body, but present in spirit. [ St Paul ]
The present fashion is always handsome. [ Proverb ]
Sorrows remembered sweeten present joy. [ Pollok ]
The future is purchased by the present. [ Johnson ]
Strong souls, within the present live.
The future veiled, the past forgot;
Grasping what is, with hands of steel,
They bind what shall be, to their will. [ Lewis Morris ]
The present moment is a powerful deity. [ Goethe ]
Love masters agony; the soul that seemed
Forsaken feels her present God again
And in her Father's arms
Contented dies away. [ John Keble ]
Where fear is present, wisdom cannot be. [ Lactantius ]
He lives twice who can at once employ
The present well and e'en the past enjoy. [ Pope ]
The golden age never was the present age. [ Proverb ]
The Present, the Present is all thou hast
For thy sure possessing;
Like the patriarch's angel hold it fast
Till it gives its blessing. [ Whittier ]
This moment is a flower too fair and brief. [ Moore ]
The present eye praises the present object. [ William Shakespeare ]
Each present joy or sorrow seems the chief. [ William Shakespeare ]
Though absent, present in desires they be;
Our souls much further than our eyes can see. [ Drayton ]
He that brings a present finds the door open. [ Proverb ]
Scorn no man's love, though of a mean degree;
Love is a present for a mighty king,--
Much less make any one thine enemy.
As guns destroy, so may a little sling. [ George Herbert ]
Let each task present its petty good to thee. [ Robert Browning ]
'Tis good for men to love their present pains
Upon example; so the spirit is eased. [ William Shakespeare ]
Theirs is the present who can praise the past. [ Shenstone ]
He that fears you present will hate you absent. [ Proverb ]
What avails it that indulgent Heaven
From mortal eyes has wrapt the woes to come,
If we, ingenious to torment ourselves.
Grow pale at hideous fictions of our own?
Enjoy the present; nor with needless cares
Of what may spring from blind misfortune's womb,
Appal the surest hour that life bestows.
Serene, and master of yourself, prepare
For what may come; and leave the rest to Heaven. [ Armstrong ]
Our present tears here, not our present laughter
Are but the handsells of our joys here after. [ Robert Herrick ]
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. [ Bohn ]
Something beyond! The immortal morning stands
Above the night, clear shines her prescient brow;
The pendulous star in her transfigured hands
Lights up the Now. [ Mary Clemmer ]
A good present need not knock long for admittance. [ Proverb ]
Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate,
All but the page prescribed - their present state. [ Pope ]
A gift with a kind countenance is a double present. [ Proverb ]
Heaven gives us friends to bless the present scene;
Resumes them, to prepare us for the next. [ Young ]
He that fears not the future may enjoy the present. [ Proverb ]
Even beauty may present a prism wearying to the eye. [ Prince de Ligne ]
Gold, when present, causes fear; when absent, grief. [ Proverb ]
It is but a short journey across the isthmus of Now. [ Bovee ]
Quickly seize the moment: only the present is thine. [ Körner ]
Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present. [ Johnson ]
The present is never a happy state to any human being; [ Dr. Johnson ]
The present is the living sum-total of the whole past. [ Carlyle ]
The present is the only reality and the only certainty. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]
Prayer is the chief thing that man may present unto God. [ Hermes ]
Woman is the sweetest present that God has given to man. [ Guyard ]
Enjoy the present day, trusting very little to the morrow. [ Horace ]
He who neglects the present moment throws away all he has. [ Schiller ]
The present is only intelligible in the light of the past. [ Trench ]
Duty and today are ours; results and futurity belong to God. [ Horace Greeley ]
He who kills a lion when absent, fears a mouse when present. [ Proverb ]
Greatness may be present in lives whose range is very small. [ Phil. Brooks ]
The love of the past is often but the hatred of the present. [ Dorian ]
Present unhappiness is selfish; past sorrow is compassionate. [ Joseph Roux ]
One of our poets - which is it? - speaks of an everlasting now. [ Southey ]
The present holds in it both the whole past and the whole future. [ Carlyle ]
Who knows whether the gods will add tomorrow to the present hour? [ Horace ]
The past gives us regret, the present sorrow, and the future fear. [ Mme. de Lambert ]
A man exercising no forethought will soon experience present sorrow. [ Confucius ]
Man, living, feeling man, is the easy sport of the overmastering present. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Present opportunities are not to be neglected; they rarely visit us twice. [ Voltaire ]
The complaints of the present times, is the general complaint of all times. [ Proverb ]
Improve time in the present; for opportunity is precious, and time is a sword. [ Saadi ]
Beauty is the first present Nature gives to women, and the first it takes away. [ Mere ]
Shallow men speak of the past, wise men of the present, and fools of the future. [ Mme. du Deffand ]
In the present day our literary masonry is well done, but our architecture is poor. [ Joubert ]
The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, the last duty done. [ George MacDonald ]
Oft the cloud that wraps the present hour serves but to brighten all our future days. [ Wm. Browne ]
Devote each day to the object then in time, and every evening will find something done. [ Goethe ]
We are not troubled by the evanescence of time, if the eternal is every moment present. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time. [ Not traceable ]
Passions are like storms which, full of present mischief, serve to purify the atmosphere. [ Ramsay ]
He is a good time-server that improves the present for God's glory and his own salvation. [ Thomas Fuller ]
We may make our future by the best use of the present. There is no moment like the present. [ Miss Edgeworth ]
Heaven makes sport of human affairs, and the present hour gives no sure promise of the next. [ Ovid ]
The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable. [ Carlyle ]
The promise given was a necessity of the past; the word broken is a necessity of the present. [ Macchiavelli ]
Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils, but present evils triumph over it. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
That caressing and exquisite grace - never bold, ever present - which just a few women possess. [ Owen Meredith ]
The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
Truth is always present: it only needs to lift the iron lids of the minds eye to read its oracles. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Books are a sort of dumb teachers; they cannot answer sudden questions, or explain present doubts. [ J. Watts ]
Genius, like a torch, shines less in the broad daylight of the present than in the night of the past. [ J. Petit-Senn ]
The moment past is no longer: the future may never be: the present is all of which man is the master. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
Children have neither past nor future; and that which seldom happens to us, they rejoice in the present. [ La Bruyere ]
Philosophy triumphs easily over evils past and evils to come; but, present evils triumph over philosophy. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Let us attend to the present, and as to the future we shall know how to manage when the occasion arrives. [ Corneille ]
When our friends are present we ought to treat them well; and when they are absent, to speak of them well. [ Epictetus ]
To all intents and purposes, he who will not open his eyes is, for the present, as blind as he who cannot. [ South ]
Let us enjoy the fugitive hour. Man Bias no harbor, time has no shore; it rushes on, and carries us with it. [ Lamartine ]
Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, and in trembling for the future. [ Rivarol ]
What is really momentous and all-important with us is the present, by which the future is shaped and colored. [ Whittier ]
The friends of the present day are of the nature of melons; we must try fifty before we meet with a good one. [ Claude-Mermet ]
Midnight, - strange mystic hour, - when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin. [ Mrs. Stowe ]
Fancy rules over two-thirds of the universe, the past and the future, while reality is confined to the present. [ Jean Paul ]
The man who will live above his present circumstances is in great danger of living, in a little, much beneath them. [ Addison ]
Be always resolute with the present hour. Every moment is of infinite value; for it is the representative of eternity. [ Goethe ]
In the present day, and especially among women, one would almost suppose that health was a state of unnatural existence. [ Beaconsfield ]
It is children only who enjoy the present; their elders either live on the memory of the past or the hope of the future. [ Chamfort ]
I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That's where the fun is! [ Donald J. Trump, Twitter Tweet, Jul 22, 2014 ]
He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and will find the flaw when he may have forgotten its Cause. [ Beecher ]
We are never present with, but always beyond ourselves. Fear, desire, and hope are still pushing us on towards the future. [ Montaigne ]
Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. [ Dickens ]
Dramatical or representative play is, as it were, a visible history; for it sets out the image of things as if they were present. [ Bacon ]
When you introduce into our schools a spirit of emulation, you have present the keenest spur admissible to the youthful intellect. [ Horace Mann ]
Fickleness has its rise in the experience of the deceptiveness of present pleasures, and in ignorance of the vanity of absent ones. [ Pascal ]
Every period of life has its peculiar prejudices; whoever saw old age, that did not applaud the past, and condemn the present times? [ Montaigne ]
Shun to seek what is hid in the Womb of the morrow, and set down as gain in life's ledger whatever time fate shall have granted thee. [ Horace ]
As the present character of a man, so his past, so his future. Who recollects distinctly his past adventures knows his destiny to come. [ Lavater ]
The most accomplished way of using books at present is to serve them as some do lords, learn their titles, and then boast of their acquaintance. [ Swift ]
Experience only can teach men not to prefer what strikes them for the present moment, to what will have much greater weight with them hereafter. [ Lord Chesterfield ]
Remembrance! celestial present, shadow of the blessings which are no longer! Thou art still a pleasure that consoles us for all those we have lost!
The present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospect. [ Thoreau ]
Grief is a species of idleness, and the necessity of attention to the present, preserves us from being lacerated and devoured by sorrow for the past. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Look upon every day, O youth, as the whole of life, not merely as a section, and enjoy the present without wishing, through haste, to spring on to another. [ Jean Paul ]
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. [ Seneca ]
The two weak points of our age are want of principle and want of profile. Style depends largely on the way the chin is worn. They are worn very high at present. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]
The post is the grand connecting link of all transactions, of all negotiations. Those who are absent, by its means become present; it is the consolation of life. [ Voltaire ]
No atheist denies a divinity, but only some name of a divinity; the God is still present there, working in that benighted heart, were it only as a god of darkness. [ Carlyle ]
Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after; the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes. [ Carlyle ]
Take all reasonable advantage of that which the present may offer you. It is the only time which is ours. Yesterday is buried forever, and tomorrow we may never see. [ Victor Hugo ]
I value the education of the intellect not for its present joy alone, but for the greater growth it gives, the enlargement of the cup to take in more and higher joys. [ Parker ]
Every day is a gift I receive from heaven; let us enjoy today that which it bestows on me. It belongs not more to the young than to me, and tomorrow belongs to no one. [ Mancroix ]
Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel and are forced to confess the misery; yet when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable. [ Dr. Johnson ]
We must never undervalue any person. The workman loves not that his work should be despised in his presence. Now God is present everywhere, and every person is His work. [ De Sales ]
Busy not yourself in looking forward to the events of tomorrow; but whatever may be those of the days Providence may yet assign you neglect not to turn them to advantage. [ Horace ]
My mind can take no hold on the present world, nor rest in it a moment, but my whole nature rushes onward with irresistible force towards a future and better state of being. [ Fichte ]
Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again; wisely improve the present, it is thine; go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
We content ourselves to present to thinking minds the original seeds from whence spring vast fields of new thought, that may be further cultivated, beautified, and enlarged. [ Chevalier Ramsay ]
Enjoy the blessings of this day if God sends them; and the evils bear patiently and sweetly. For this day only is ours; we are dead to yesterday, and we are not born to tomorrow. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
Try to be happy in this present moment, and put not off being so to a time to come, - as though that time should be of another make from this, which has already come and is ours. [ Fuller ]
The poetry of the ancients was that of possession, ours is that of aspiration; the former stands fast on the soil of the present, the latter hovers between memory and anticipation. [ Schlegel ]
I have tormented the present with the preoccupations of the future; I have put my judgment in the place of Providence, and the happy child has been transformed into a care-worn man! [ E. Souvestre ]
Extreme avarice is nearly always mistaken; there is no passion which is oftener further away from its mark, nor upon which the present has so much power to the prejudice of the future. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
The present is withered by our wishes for the future; we ask for more air, more light, more space, more fields, a larger home. Ah! does one need so much room to love a day, and then to die? [ E. Souvestre ]
For from the crushed flowers of gladness on the road of life a sweet perfume is wafted over to the present hour, as marching armies often send out from heaths the fragrance of trampled plants. [ Richter ]
Faith in the hereafter is as necessary for the intellectual as the moral character; and to the man of letters, as well as to the Christian, the present forms but the slightest portion of his existence. [ Southey ]
It is more reasonable to wish for reputation while it may be enjoyed, as Anacreon calls upon his companions to give him for present use the wine and garlands which they propose to bestow upon his tomb. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Yes, what I am to be everlastingly, I am growing to be now - now in this Present time so little thought of, this time which the sun rises and sets in, and the clock strikes in, and I wake and sleep in. [ William Mountford ]
Why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all, or you may never live to see it? For every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making. [ Sydney Smith ]
It is well known that a loose and easy dress contributes much to give to both sexes those fine proportions of body that are observable in the Grecian statues, and which serve as models to our present artists. [ Rousseau ]
If we stand in the openings of the present moment, with all the length and breadth of our faculties unselfishly adjusted to what it reveals, we are in the best condition to receive what God is always ready to communicate. [ T. C. Upham ]
Gifts of rings by lovers have always been common; but how pleasant when the husband can look to the past, to the present, to the future, with feelings of love, honor, and duty, and not as is often the case with repentance. [ Miss L. E. Landon ]
There are two kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must compel its age to understand it; the second understands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told. [ Lowell ]
Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them; and wise men also, for its duties engage them. Our grand business undoubtedly is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. [ Thomas Carlyle ]
Of God's light I was not utterly bereft, if my as yet sealed eyes, with their unspeakable longing, could nowhere see Him; nevertheless in my heart He was present and His heaven-written law still stood legible and sacred there. [ Carlyle ]
One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday. [ Emerson ]
Make use of time, if thou lovest eternity; know yesterday cannot be recalled, tomorrow cannot be assured; today is only thine; Which if thou procrastinate, thou losest; which lost, is lost forever. One today is worth two tomorrows. [ Quarles ]
At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honorably distinguished for fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling. [ Macaulay ]
Besides the pleasure derived from acquired knowledge, there lurks in the mind of man, and tinged with a shade of sadness, an unsatisfactory longing for something beyond the present, a striving towards regions yet unknown and unopened. [ Wilhelm von Humboldt ]
Worldly ambition is founded on pride or envy, but emulation, or laudable ambition, is actually founded in humility; for it evidently implies that we have a low opinion of our present attainments, and think it necessary to be advanced. [ Bishop Hall ]
Avarice often produces opposite effects; there is an infinite number of people who sacrifice all their property to doubtful and distant expectations; others despise great future advantages to obtain present interests of a trifling nature. [ Kochefoucauld ]
Abridge your hopes in proportion to the shortness of the span of human life; for while we converse, the hours, as if envious of our pleasure, fly away. Enjoy, therefore, the present time, and trust not too much to what tomorrow may produce. [ Horace ]
Men spend their lives in anticipations, in determining to be vastly happy at some period or other, when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other - it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future are not come. [ Colton ]
Seek such union to the Son of God as, leaving no present death within, shall make the second death impossible, and shall leave in all your future only that shadow of death which men call dissolution, and which the gospel calls sleeping in Jesus. [ James Hamilton ]
How dear the sure counsel of a present friend, whose heavenly power failing, the lonely one sinks in silence; for earnest thought and resolution, locked within his breast, are slowly ripened; the presence of the loved one soon warms them into being. [ Goethe ]
The absent one is an ideal person; those who are present seem to one another to be quite commonplace. It is a silly thing that the ideal is, as it were, ousted by the real; that may be the reason why to the moderns their ideal only manifests itself in longing. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Fame is a revenue payable only to our ghosts; and to deny ourselves all present satisfaction, or to expose ourselves to so much hazard for this, were as great madness as to starve ourselves, or fight desperately for food, to be laid on our tombs after our death. [ Mackenzie ]
Custom is the law of one description of fools, and fashion of another; but the two parties often clash - for precedent is the legislator of the first, and novelty of the last. Custom, therefore, looks to things that are past, and fashion to things that are present. [ Colton ]
Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past. [ Lowell ]
Bright and illustrious illusions! Who can blame, who laugh at the boy, who not admire and commend him, for that desire of a fame outlasting the Pyramids by which he insensibly learns to live in a life beyond the present, and nourish dreams of a good unattainable by the senses? [ Bulwer-Lytton ]
How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten. [ Washington Irving ]
It is necessary to look forward as well as backward, as some think it is always necessary to regulate their conduct by things that have been done of old times, but that past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on an alternative of some past that went before it. [ Madame De Stael ]
Wise men, for the most part, are silent at present, and good men powerless; the senseless vociferate, and the heartless govern; while all social law and providence are dissolved by the enraged agitation of a multitude, among whom every villain has a chance of power, every simpleton of praise, and every scoundrel of fortune. [ John Ruskin ]
Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass. [ Hazlitt ]
It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than anything else. [ Ruskin ]
The habit of reading is the only enjoyment I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. It will be present to you when the energies of your body have fallen away from you. It will last you until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live. [ Trollope ]
Let any man examine his thoughts, and he will find them ever occupied with the past or the future. We scarcely think at all of the present; or if we do, it is only to borrow the light which it gives, for regulating the future. The present is never our object; the past and the present we use as means; the future only is our end. Thus, we never live, we only hope to live. [ Pascal ]
There is no moment like the present: not only so, but moreover, there is no moment at all, that is, no instant force and energy, but in the present. The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards; they will be dissipated, lost, and perish in the hurry and skurry of the world, or sunk in the slough of indolence. [ Miss Edgeworth ]
The brute animals have all the same sensations of pain as human beings, and consequently endure as much pain when their body is hurt; but in their case the cruelty of torment is greater, because they have no mind to bear them up against their sufferings, and no hope to look forward to when enduring the last extreme pain. Their happiness consists entirely in present enjoyment. [ Chalmers ]
Superstition is the fear of a spirit whose passions and acts are those of a man, who is present in some places, and not in others; who makes some places holy, and not others; who is kind to one person, and unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrificing a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. [ John Ruskin ]
Whatever we may say against such collections which present authors in a disjointed form, they nevertheless bring about many excellent results. We are not always so composed, so full of wisdom, that we are able to take in at once the whole scope of a work according to its merits. Do we not mark in a book passages which seem, to have a direct reference to ourselves? Young people especially, who have failed in acquiring a complete cultivation of the mind, are roused in a praiseworthy way by brilliant quotations." [ Goethe ]
Mother! How many delightful associations cluster around that word! The innocent smiles of infancy, the gambols of boyhood, and the happiest hours of riper years! When my heart aches and my limbs are weary travelling the thorny path of life, I sit down on some mossy stone, and closing my eyes on real scenes, send my spirit back to the days of early life; I feel afresh my infant joys and sorrows, till my spirit recovers its tone, and is willing to pursue its journey. But in all these reminiscences my mother rises; if I seat myself upon my cushion, it is at her side; if I sing, it is to her ear; if I walk the walls or the meadows, my little hand is in my mother's, and my little feet keep company with hers; when my heart bounds with its best joy, it is because at the performance of some task, or the recitation of some verses, I receive a present from her hand. There is no velvet so soft as a mother's lap, no rose so lovely as her smile, no path so flowery as that imprinted with her footsteps. [ Bishop Thomson ]
Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge: it is immortal as the heart of men. If the labors of the men of science should ever create any revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will then sleep no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of the respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on. as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man. [ Wordsworth ]