Lennart Meri Quotes

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.

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

It's very easy to lose track of the environment around you, to lose touch with the present.

As a kid in Africa, you were so connected to nature itself because you went farming, watched the moon out at night, observed how the sky was different, and how the birds chanted different songs in the evening and the morning.

Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.

If you spend time alone in the wilderness, you get very attuned to living things.

I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence.

Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.

In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chaparral, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness.

What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.

Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn't live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.

How much does a man live, after all?/ Does he live a thousand days, or one only? For a week, or for several centuries?/ How long does a man spend dying?/ What does it mean to say 'for ever'?

Aside from Velcro, time is the most mysterious substance in the universe.

I do not cut my life up into days but my days into lives, each day, each hour, an entire life.

this present moment never comes to be and it never ceases to be, it is simply our minds that construct the continuity of thoughts we call time. In the present moment is nirvana.

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

... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.

We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.

The concept of time shuts off eternity.

In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.

Old & New put their stamp to everything in Nature. The snowflake that is now falling is marked by both. The present moment gives the motion & the color of the flake: Antiquity, its form & properties. All things wear a luster which is the gift of the present & a tarnish of time.

that which is eternal within the moment only becomes shallow if spread out in time.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.

We think we’re in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.