Quote | Author | Date | Note |
---|---|---|---|
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely. |
W. H. Auden | 1907 – 1973 | |
Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow. |
Horace | 65 BC – 8 BC | Carpe diem quam minimum credula. |
Your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow. |
Robert Toru Kiyosaki | born 1947 | |
Most of us assume as a matter of common sense that space is nothing, that it’s not important and has no energy. But as a matter of fact, space is the basis of existence. How could you have stars without space? Stars shine out of space and something comes out of nothing just in the same way as when you listen, in an unprejudiced way, you hear all sounds coming out of silence. It is amazing. Silence is the origin of sound just as space is the origin of stars, and woman is the origin of man. If you listen and pay close attention to what is, you will discover that there is no past, no future, and no one listening. You cannot hear yourself listening. You live in the eternal now and you are that. |
Alan W. Watts | 1915 – 1973 | |
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world. |
Alan W. Watts | 1915 – 1973 | |
I have realised that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. |
Alan W. Watts | 1915 – 1973 | |
For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, ‘Now, I’ve arrived!’ Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now. |
Alan W. Watts | 1915 – 1973 | |
If my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world. |
Alan W. Watts | 1915 – 1973 | |
Let me die a youngman’s death |
Roger McGough | born 1937 | Let me die a youngman’s death |
No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them. |
Alan W. Watts | 1915 – 1973 | |
There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to catch it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always here and there is no escape from it. And when we turn around to find the self which knows this moment, we find that it has vanished like the past. |
Alan W. Watts | 1915 – 1973 | |
This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realise it is play. |
Alan W. Watts | 1915 – 1973 | |
Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly. |
Alan W. Watts | 1915 – 1973 | |
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotised by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal 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 realise 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 W. Watts | 1915 – 1973 | |
We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that…Also watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence…you wait till later to find out what the sentence means…The present is always changing the past. |
Alan W. Watts | 1915 – 1973 | |
When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. |
Alan W. Watts | 1915 – 1973 | |
Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present. |
Alan W. Watts | 1915 – 1973 | |
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present. |
Bil Keane | 1922 – 2011 |