Henry Van Dyke Quotes

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 we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us.

We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.

There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future.

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.

To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.

'Nowness' is a dynamic relation between the past and the future.

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.

Time slips through our hands like grains of sand, never to return again.

You have the illusion of free will, but, in fact, that illusion comes about because you don't know the future. Because you are a prisoner of the present, forever locked in transition, between the past and the future.

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell.

The Present only has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory only, but things to come have no being at all; the Future but a fiction of the mind.

While we're talking, time will have meanly run on... pick today's fruits, not relying on the future in the slightest.

The past is no longer yours; the future is not yet in your power. You have only the present wherein to do good.

Live in the present, remember the past, and fear not the future, for it doesn't exist and never shall. There is only now.

The present is our future past, we've gotta make this moment last

The past is history, the future's a mystery.

Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store?

But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.

The past is gone-the future is not come. And we are here together, you and I.

Even people capable of living in the past don't really know what the future holds.

I've been aware of the time passing by they say in the end it's the wink of an eye and when the morning light comes streaming in you'll get up and do it again

Time is a stream which glides smoothly on and is past before we know.