Present - Quotes
The great moral questions of the present age are those about human rights, war, poverty, the vast disparities between rich and poor, the fact that somewhere in the third world a child dies every two and a half seconds because of starvation or remediable disease. The churches` obsessions over pre-marital sex and whether divorced couples can remarry in church appears contemptible in the light of this mountain of human suffering and need. By distracting attention from what really counts, and focusing it on the minor and anyway futile attempt to get people to conduct their personal lives only in ways the church permits, harm is done to the cause of good in the world.
It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population.
Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves, narratives. I am not this momentary mass of flesh reclined on the sofa typing the letter a on my laptop; I am my thoughts full of the traces of the phrases that I am writing; I am my mother`s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I`ve written, what I`ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word "memory" into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.
How we behave is a balancing act between our future and present selves. In the future, we want to be fit, but in the present, we want the candy bar. In the future, we want to be a well-rounded, wellinformed intellectual virtuoso, but right now we want to watch Jersey Shore. Behavioral economists call this present bias - the gap between your preferences for your future self and your preferences in the current moment.
Live in the present, remember the past, and fear not the future, for it doesn`t exist and never shall. There is only now.
This is what man is like, a singular sample.
No copy existed before, nor does one at present.
As on a living branch each leaf is different
so time itself will breed no simulacrum.
It is obviously impossible to live in the present. The brain-computer has no program for it. That we live in the past and in the future, in memories and hopes, in past accomplishments and plans for the future, is based on one of those odd laws of the human psyche.
You should never fast-forward into the future. Because every time you do, you rob yourself of the journey, the present moment, which, in the end, is all there really is.
The present system means joyless drudgery, semi- starvation, rags and premature death; and they vote for it and uphold it. Let them have what they vote for! Let them drudge and let them starve!
When your worst fears are fulfilled when everything you expect is gone, something is still driving us to fix the past or get into the future. When the only thing we should pay attention to is the present. And to the many possibilities of the present.