Audra McDonald Quotes

The future is keeping you out of the present time.

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

If you think about the future, you lose perspective of the present.

Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don’t rent them out to tomorrow. Do you know what you’re doing when you spend a moment wondering how things are going to turn out with Perry? You’re cheating yourself out of today. Today is calling to you, trying to get your attention, but you’re stuck on tomorrow, and today trickles away like water down a drain. You wake up the next morning and that today you wasted is gone forever. It’s now yesterday. Some of those moments may have had wonderful things in store for you , but now you’ll never know.

I do not believe in living in either the future or the past.

It's so easy to get caught up in the future and in the past.

The only time you'll ever have is now.

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?

If you have one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, you're pissing all over today.

The way to 'get there' is to 'be there'

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.

If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday, and worries over what might happen tomorrow, we have no today in which to live.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. Most of us spend fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past, with regret for lost joys or shame for things badly done (both utterly useless and weakening) or in a future which we either long for or dread. . . . There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute, here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle. Which is exactly what it is-a miracle and unrepeatable.

The more you are focused on time-past and future-the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

It sometimes seems that we live as if we wonder when life is going to begin. It isn't always clear just what we are waiting for, but some of us sometimes persist in waiting so long that life slips by - finding us still waiting for something that has been going on all the time. . . . This is the life in which the work of this life is to be done. Today is as much a part of eternity as any day a thousand years ago or as will be any day a thousand years hence. This is it, whether we are thrilled or disappointed, busy or bored! This is life, and it is passing.

Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.

Quit worrying about how everything is going to turn out. Live one day at a time; better yet, make the most of this moment. It’s good to have a big – picture outlook, to set goals, to establish budgets and make plans, but if you’re always living in the future, you’re never really enjoying the present in the way God wants you to.

I'm always pre-occupied with what it is that I'm doing at the moment.

We do not rest satisfied with the present.... So imprudent we are that we wander in the times which are not ours and do not thinkof the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us.

Stop living a day at a time and stop worrying about age.

I've always been hopelessly stuck in the present.

Most people don't know what's happening around them because they're just speeding through life. And before they know it, they're just old. So I just try to slow it down.

One thing I've learned to do with my age, I really don't look ahead. For years, I've been preaching the precious present and having to always subscribe to it.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

It's ungrateful to be wishing you were doing something else at the moment you are living. You haven't lived in the moment that you are really living, you are wishing you were somewhere else.