Temporal Focus Quotes

It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present and a waste to live in the future.

I don't care what happens in 100 years. I won't be around.

… frittered away, 9 times out of 10, in things which pertain to the body and not to the spirit; upon richer food and drink, better clothing, more extravagant living, which are beneficial neither to rich or nor poor.

The best time is always yesterday.

The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.

Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.

We make provisions for this life as if it were never to have an end, and for the other life as though it were never to have a beginning.

We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.

The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.

The only thing that matters is here and the only thing that matters is now. And America's inability to delay gratification is because we do not have eternal thinking.

Most men of business think "Anyhow this system will probably last my time. It has gone on a long time, and is likely to go on still.

Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.

Theres heaven in the sweet by and by but there is to be victory in the nasty now and now.

The present eye praises the present object.

Men who think in lifetimes are of little use to statesmanship.

Even so does he who provides for the short time of this life, but takes no care for all eternity; which is to be wise for a moment, but a fool for ever; and to act as crossly to the reason of things as can be imagined; to regard time as if it were eternity, and to neglect eternity as if it were but a short time.

If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.

The fact that I spend a lot of time in the 18th century doesn't mean I'm not concerned with the 21st.

I don't care about lasting. I just want right now.

In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.

I don't really invest too much in the future.

You don't want no pie in the sky when you die, You want something here on the ground while you're still around.

It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.