Diana Gabaldon Quotes

I don't want to sit and look at all the trophies. I don't want to live in the past -- I want to live now!

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

Do not pursue the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. The past no longer is. The future has not yet come. Looking deeply at life as it is. In the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom. We must be diligent today. To wait until tomorrow is too late. Death comes unexpectedly. How can we bargain with it? The sage calls a person who knows how to dwell in mindfulness night and day, 'one who knows the better way to live alone.'

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

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.

There is no point in regretting any part of the past. The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.

Forget the past. You can never predict what the future is going to be. Live for the moment.

Every man's life lies within the present; for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain.

All that either of us has is right now and we should pay attention to that.

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.

The time is now, the place is here. Stay in the present. You can do nothing to change the past, and the future will never come exactly as you plan or hope for.

A man is a fool who sits looking backward from himself in the past. Ah, what shallow, vain conceit there is in man! Forget the things that are behind. That is not where you live. Your roots are not there. They are in the present; and you should reach up into the other life.

The present is burdened too much with the past. We have not time, in our earthly existence, to appreciate what is warm with life, and immediately around us.

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.

The only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment, because this is the only moment any of us ever gets. You're only here now; you're only alive in this moment.

It's too easy, you see, to get trapped in the past. The past is very seductive. People always talk about the mists of time, you know, but really it's the present that's in a mist, uncertain. The past is quite clear, and warm, and comforting. That's why people often get stuck there.

I teach you that there is no other aim than to live with such totality that each moment becomes a celebration. The very idea of "aim" brings future into the mind, because any aim, any end, any goal, needs future. All your goals deprive you of your present, which is the only reality you have. The future is only your imagination, and the past is just footprints left in the sands of your memory. Neither is the past real anymore, nor is the future real yet. This moment is the only reality.

I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.

If you try to live that which is past, that which IS will bypass you.

Letting go of the past means that you can enjoy the dream that is happening right now.

The past is gone. I know it sounds cliché, but you're here. Like be in it. And boxing was a really good analogy for me to try and carry that in my everyday life all the time.

The Past is gone and the future might not even be, the only thing we ever experience is the now, I try to enjoy the minute.

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

And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.