Present Quotes

The present time is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.

Samuel Johnson

Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting: that our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any of us as are the present and the past.

Dean Koontz

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities --a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces --a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

Joseph Conrad

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 Watts

It is well to remember that there are five reasons for drinking: the arrival of a friend; ones present or future thirst; the excellence of the wine; or any other reason.

Latin saying

A world-picture that encompasses science but also the deep wisdom of theology may help us to explain how it is we can think, how we discover the extraordinary, but so too it may warn us of present dangers and future catastrophes . . .

Simon Conway Morris

Being fully present is the best guarantee for a bright future.

Guy Finley

Music will always find its way to us, with or without business, politics, religion, or any other bullshit attached. Music survives everything, and like God, it is always present. It needs no help, and suffers no hindrance.

Eric Clapton

An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.

Anatole Broyard

Power alone determines the present order of the world.

Vellupillai Pirapakaran

Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.

Samuel Johnson

Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself…. When we compare the (present) human population of the globe with … that of former times, we see that “chemical imperialism” has been … the main end to which human intelligence has been devoted.

Bertrand Russell

Guilt is present in the very hesitation, even though the deed be not committed.

Cicero

Guilt is present in the very hesitation, even though the deed be not committed

Cicero

With respect to the two words "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. If the words obtained so readily a place in the "Articles of Confederation," and received so little notice in their admission into the present Constitution, and retained for so long a time a silent place in both, the fairest explanation is, that the words, in the alternative of meaning nothing or meaning everything, had the former meaning taken for granted

James Madison