William James Quotes

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.

Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

Celebrity was a long time in coming; it will go away. Everything goes away.

The moment rules over everything.

I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

Time destroys everything.

Time is not kind to everything.

Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.

Time is the devourer of all things.

Time is death.

Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

Everything changes. The more I try to hold on to the moment, the more it slips through my fingers.

Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That's the way we live our lives.

It was becoming clear to me that I shouldn't bother to get too attached to anything. Turn your back and you lose it. Just like that.

You never know. It's just. It's like. POOF. And you're gone.

O the world is but a word; were it all yours to give it in a breath, how quickly were it gone!

Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.

All things fade and quickly turn to myth.

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.

There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to catch it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always here and there is no escape from it. And when we turn around to find the self which knows this moment, we find that it has vanished like the past.

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.

The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation..., the more elusive it becomes... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.