Townes Van Zandt Quotes

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

We have to keep an eye on the future with a sense of the past in every passing moment of the present.

Happy is the person who knows what to remember of the past, what to enjoy in the present, and what to plan for in the future.

The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

One of the primary reasons why the human brain has evolved to look so far into the future is so that we can take actions in the present that will bring us to a better future rather than a worse one.

I believe you can remember the future as much as the past.

Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future - that's fabulous.

The future doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we're the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.

A great source of calamity lies in regret and anticipation; therefore a person is wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or future.

Learn from the past, look to the future, but live in the present.

Man is a recording animal.

Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present. Fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

Remember the past, live the present, think a little less about the future.

I stopped feeling nostalgia for the moment because I imagine myself looking back on it from the future, which really freaks me out.

Whenever we're having a great time, we're already anticipating the day when we will remember this great time. Many of us live in that unreal area between the past, the present, and the future.

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.

No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.

The false self lives mainly through memory and anticipation. Past and future are its main preoccupation.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you're going to say, 'Where did we come from, what happens next?' The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

The way you remember the past depends upon your hope for the future. And if what you see in your future has no hope, it has no potential, then you view the past that brought you to here as not very good.

We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present.

To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present.