There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents,... each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor th...e present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Conventions, at the present moment, are really menaced. The most striking sign of this is that people are now making unconventiona...lity a social virtue, instead of an unsocial vice. The switches have been opened, and the laden trains must take their chance of a destination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He who wishes to maintain that the past of mankind no longer has any absolute value in life ... must also be ready to deny his own... life until the present moment, indeed in advance until the last moment, as worthless. He who realizes that culture is the giving of form will also see that the highest forms that it is given to the human spirit to recognize have always been, psychologically considered, such evasions from the present. Considerations such as these do not at all square with the direction of America's mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for ...a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about... eighty-five per cent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The animals are much more content with mere existence than we are; the plants are wholly so; and man is so according to how dull a...nd insensitive he is. The animal's life consequently contains less suffering but also less pleasure than the human's, the direct reason being that on the one hand it is free from care and anxiety and the torments that attend them, but on the other is without hope and therefore has no share in that anticipation of a happy future which, together with the enchanting products of the imagination which accompany it, is the source of most of our greatest joys and pleasures. The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity... there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to... stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with pe...rfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »