The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Nor is it right to say there are three times: past, present and future. Perhaps it would be more correct to say: there are three times: a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future.
The present is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action.
Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.
When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.
Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us.
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
The time present of things past is memory; the time present of things present is direct experience; the time present of things future is expectation.
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.
The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future.
What is past is prologue.
Consciousness is a link between what was and what will be; a bridge between the past and the future.
Everything that was is no longer; everything that will be is not yet. Look no further for the secret of our ills.
The present is big with the future; the future could be read in the past; the distant is expressed in the near.
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.
Ah, who brings the happy moments, Glorious days of sweet first love; Who can bring back a single hour Of that blessed time again.
It is pleasant to think of labours that are past.
If, then, 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.
I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. I love to live.
The mysterious way leads inwards. Eternity with its worlds — the past and future — is in ourselves or nowhere.
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
Study the past, if you would divine the future.
We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
We live trapped, between the churned-up and examined past and a future that waits for our work.
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.
