Robert Adams Quotes

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.

There is no past. That's another illusion. Everything that has ever happened to you, to me, to anyone in this world, happened in the present moment. That's all there ever is. So your relationship to life isn't your relationship to your past, it's your relationship to the present moment.

... If we consider the difference between William Henry Jackson packing in his camera by mule, and the person stepping for a moment from his car to take a picture with his Instamatic, it becomes clear how some of our space has vanished; if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space 'in no time' is to have denied its reality.

People don't realize that now is all there ever is; there is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind.

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

I want to challenge the presumption that the world cannot know it is the world unless there is an alternative to the world.

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.

Your entire life only happens in this moment. The present moment is life itself. Yet, people live as if the opposite were true and treat the present moment as a stepping stone to the next moment - a means to an end.

Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.

Past, present, and future is where I'm at.

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

For observing nature, the best pace is a snail's pace.

All experience is now. Now never ends.

The art of seeing nature, or, in other words, the art of using models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed.

So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.

I love the fact that the present is the only real reality we have.

To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.

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.

Nature is what you see plus what you think about it.

And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.

Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.

Another way to look at meditation is to view thinking itself as a waterfall, a cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness, we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantage point in a cave or depression in the rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.

Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what's large. Step into the ocean or walk on Mount Tamalpais, and that kind of amnesia and self-centeredness isn't possible. Enter the natural world at all, you see existence emerge, ripen, fall and continue, and you can't help but feel more tender towards self and others. That summoning into the large and the shared is what poems exist also to do.