Thomas Merton Quotes

Bliss cannot be found by remembering the past or anticipating the future.

We all spend so much time worrying about the future that the present moment slips right out of our hands. And so all we have left is retrospection and anticipation, retrospection and anticipation. In which case what's left to recall but past anticipation? What's left to anticipate but future retrospection?

Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store?

Die to the past every moment. You don't need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present. Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. Feel your presence.

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

Our whole energy remains blocked either in the past or in the future. When you withdraw all your energy from past and future a tremendous explosion happens.

There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again.

This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it's with us wherever we go.

Right now a moment of time is passing by!... We must become that moment.

But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.

We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell.

. . . Action always happens in the present, because it is an expression of the body, which can only exist in the here and now. But the mind is like a phantom that lives only in the past or future. It's only power over you is to draw your attention our of the present.

Live in the present, remember the past, and fear not the future, for it doesn't exist and never shall. There is only now.

I'm not sitting somewhere dwelling on the past. I'm not fretting or obsessing about something in the future.

The past is over and done and cannot be changed. This is the only moment we can experience.

How can we live if there is no more here and everything is now?

The past is gone-the future is not come. And we are here together, you and I.

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

Only when your consciousness is totally focused on the moment you are in can you receive whatever gift, lesson, or delight that moment has to offer.

I've always been someone who's really tried to live in the here and now. My memory isn't very good so maybe that's why, but it just seems like I've been living this life, my current chapter, for a really long time and I don't really remember what it was like before. It's just been sort of ingrained in me. What I deal with day to day.

I just live in the moment.

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.

You can't really live in the past because the present is always present.