Octavio Paz Quotes

If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever.

Live for today. Multitudes of people have failed to live for today.... What they have had within their grasp today they have missed entirely, because only the future has intrigued them.

There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again.

Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simmple, sel-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.

As long as we have some definite idea about or some hope in the future, we cannot really be serious with the moment that exists right now.

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

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

I love having no sense of tomorrow or yesterday.

I've always been someone who's really tried to live in the here and now. My memory isn't very good so maybe that's why, but it just seems like I've been living this life, my current chapter, for a really long time and I don't really remember what it was like before. It's just been sort of ingrained in me. What I deal with day to day.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

People say to me, 'What are you going to be doing in five years?' The thing is, I don't care! It's what I'm doing today that matters.

Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.

The future is not so interesting for me because the future doesn't exist. I am really focused on the contemporary.

I'm very much about living in the moment and taking each day as it comes.

Be happy now. It's a great Western disease that we'll be happy in the future - when we get higher status or that BMW or that promotion or this project finished. Instead, be happy now.

I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living now.

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

There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.

The only time you'll ever have is now.

Stop talking about tomorrow. You owe it to yourself to do whatever you can to live you can to live a better life today.

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?

My focus, my life, my world is now. You just can't plan the future.

As you get older, you see how rapidly the years and decades fly by, so I would encourage anyone, no matter the age, to seize their life and be fully present.

When I find myself focusing overmuch on the anticipated future happiness of arriving at a certain goal, I remind myself to 'Enjoy now'. If I can enjoy the present, I don't need to count on the happiness that is (or isn't) waiting for me in the future".

Every moment that I am centered in the future I suffer a temporary loss of this life.