Mark Van Doren Quotes

In basketball - as in life - true joy comes from being fully present in each and every moment, not just when things are going your way. Of course, it's no accident that things are more likely to go your way when you stop worrying about whether you're going to win or lose and focus your full attention on what's happening right this moment.

Most people when they're walking are thinking about where they have to go and what they have to do. But that removes us from happiness.

You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present.

I'm alive. When I'm eating that's all I think about. If I'm on the march, I just concentrate on marching. If I have to fight,it will be just as good a day as any to die. If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. Life is the moment we are living now.

The best gift we can have is living in the present moment and really enjoying it for what it is; and, not being in our heads and getting sidetracked.

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

I am only at home in the present.

Sometimes it's a struggle to live in the moment.

Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die.

I just want to enjoy every moment and try to be present in the moment of whatever I'm doing at that time.

I've always tried to live in the moment.

Our thinking minds deprive us of the happiness that comes when we are living fully in the moment.

When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you're not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You're drinking your projects, you're drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.

If we do not find happiness in the present moment, in what shall we find it?

Whatever you do, whatever you're working with, whether it's manual work or talking to people or buying or selling, every little thing encompasses the power and simplicity of presence.

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

This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

You cannot be both unhappy, and fully present in the Now.

Everyone rushes his life on, and suffers from a yearning for the future and a boredom with the present. But that man who devotes every hour to his own needs, who plans every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears tomorrow.

The way to 'get there' is to 'be there'

Right now, though, I wanted not to think forward or backward, but only to lose myself in the words.

You have to be present, awake and happy now.

You don't need a plan; you just need to be present.

Why not just live in the moment, especially if it has a good beat?