William Godwin Quotes

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

I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

From about 5 years old on, I was very contemplative and started to become constantly filled with nostalgia for the present moment and the feeling that it's always fleeting.

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.

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.

Human's can't live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human's are always thinking about the future or the past.

I don't really look back or forward too much. That's not to say I live in the moment, because I struggle with that as well.

If you are always talking about the past, then you don't really have much in the present.

It's easy to look into the future and worry about the past.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

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

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

My first memory was of stories about the past - a past that, according to the storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived. It didn't take me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was gone, and nothing could be done about it.

I've always been hopelessly stuck in the present.

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.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

I spend a lot of time in the future, But to help the future, sometimes you got to go back to the past, and sometimes you got to stay in the present.

Thinking ahead or thinking behind is not good for me.

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

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.

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

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.