Thornton Wilder Quotes

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

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.

I'm not the first one to say it, but that time onstage is a heightened sense of present tense.

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

The present moment dies every moment to become the past , is reborn every moment into the future. All experience is now. Now never ends.

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.

Because I don't live in either my past or my future.I'm interested only in the present".

It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.

There's nothing in the future and there's nothing in the past. There is only this one moment, and you've got to make it last.

It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. All there is ever, is the now.

I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away. The truth is in the present moment. The great paradox is that when I'm really able to do that, time slows down and opens up. Time feels suddenly and inexplicably without end.

Spirituality tells the seeker not to live in the hoary past, not to live in the remote future, but to live in the immediacy of today, in the eternal Now.

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.

Attention-yes! That's present! And present, you see, makes past and future.

Our thoughts are always pulling us into the future or the past, away from the present. But it is in the present moment that we find Spirit, our essential being and the force that animates all life.

Every drop of water in an ocean contains the flavor of the whole ocean. So too, every moment in time contains the flavor of eternity, if you could live in that moment, but most people do not live in the moment which is the only time they really have.

But on stage you're able to just take the character from one point to the end and it's a fluid, organic piece. It's about being completely present all the time, right there in the moment.

The heart knows nothing of the past, nothing of the future; it knows only of the present.

The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.

The past is no more and the future is not yet. The only right person is one who lives moment to moment, whose arrow is directed to the moment, who is always here and now; wherever he is, his whole consciousness, his whole being, is involved in the reality of here and in the reality of now.

The present gives you the opportunity to dive deep into the water of life, or to fly high into the sky of life. But on both the sides there are dangers - 'past' and ´future´ are the most dangerous words in human language.

The meeting of two eternities, the past and future....is precisely the present moment.

Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.