If you live in the past, you don’t enjoy what is happening right now because you will always wish it to be different than it is.
—Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements
There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.
—George Carlin
whoever saw old age that did not applaud the past and condemn the present?
—Michel de Montaigne
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
—Robertson Davies
However fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, thinks and lives fashionably; virtue and honor will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honor will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so.
—Robertson Davies
Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a conflict. Patience is not waiting passively until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient, we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Let's be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.
—Henri J. M. Nouwen
When you're traveling, you are what you are, right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
—William Least Heat Moon
It was time to let go of the mad desire to remember. It was time to start living whatever life would come. In the present, not the past.
—Adi Alsaid in Let's Get Lost
The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
What was it about life now? The people who weren't present always seemed to be more important than the people who were.
—Elin Hilderbrand in Beautiful Day
When you're in love, every day is like a present you get to open.
—Elin Hilderbrand in Winter Storms