Charlie Haden Quotes

We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.

Best to take the moment present as a present for the moment. . .

Enlightenment does not ask you to be perfect; it simply asks you to find perfection right where you stand.

Step into this moment, because it is the only one you have right now. It is not wasted or thrown away. The divine opportunity could be stolen unless you tell yourself it is here right now; available to you this moment, to make of it anything you choose. Why not choose this moment, right now, to be available to yourself by declaring, I AM GOOD! . . . . The richness of the present is here. The fullness of now is present. If you are not here now, it means you could be missing the love, joy, peace and brand-new ideas that are here right now.

Your life is a series of moments in "now." The better you make your "now" the better your life.

I’m beginning to think that you don’t find happiness from living your life looking ahead or back… that you find it when you look around.

You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You can find yourself by coming into the present.

Work to recognize the primary importance of the present moment. A good little pointer toward that is to ask yourself, "What is my relationship with the present moment? How am I relating to it?"

The only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment, because this is the only moment any of us ever gets. You're only here now; you're only alive in this moment.

If you are worrying about tomorrow, you can't possibly enjoy today. Think about it: you can't really give God tomorrow; you can give him only what you have, and today is all you have.

If I am incapable of washing dishes joyfully, if I want to finish them quickly so I can go and have dessert, I will be equally incapable of enjoying my dessert. With the fork in my hand, I will be thinking about what to do next, and the texture and flavor of the dessert, together with the pleasure of eating it, will be lost. I will always be dragged into the future, never able to live in the present moment.

I've stopped thinking all the time of what happened yesterday. And stopped asking what's going to happen tomorrow. What's happening today, this minute, is what I care about.

We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.

I think that when you're in your twenties you think about your future, when you're in your thirties you're raising kids and you think about their future, but when you get to a time when you are diagnosed with any kind of life altering illness, what did you take away from it? And what I took away from it was how to live in the "now".

Only in the reality of the present can we love, can we awaken, can we find peace and understanding and connection with ourselves and the world.

You are not going to find yourself anywhere except right where you are.

Every moment of your experience is the peak of life experience. This is where your powerful now is.

... whatever is not happening now is unimportant; it is merely curious.

My life is every moment of my life. It is not a culmination of the past.

I have always wanted to live in the present and never the past.

I guess I'm living in the present more than the past.

But whenever I look at the question of how to live, the answer's always staring me in the face. I'm already doing it.

Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present. Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have made.

I try, in the present, to not exalt the past because I think that's such a way of diminishing the present. And it's hard to live like that.

I don't think about why I do what I do, or why I started doing what I do, because I'm so obsessed with doing it right now, and what it means to me right now.