Quotes
Quotes about Present
Trust no future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, act in the living present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!
Yet sometimes glimpses on my sight,
Through present wrong the eternal right;
And, step by step, since time began,
I see the steady gain of man;
It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising; but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.
At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.
The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature--a type nowhere at present existing.
I sit alone at present, dreaming darkly of a Dun.
Golden hours of vision come to us in this present life, when we are at our best, and our faculties work together in harmony.
Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat.
Submit to the present evil, lest a greater one befall you.
It was a custom with Apelles, to which he most tenaciously adhered, never to let any day pass, however busy he might be, without exercising himself by tracing some outline or other,--a practice which has now passed into a proverb. It was also a practice with him, when he had completed a work, to exhibit it to the view of the passers-by in his studio, while he himself, concealed behind the picture, would listen to the criticisms.... Under these circumstances, they say that he was censured by a shoemaker for having represented the shoes with one latchet too few. The next day, the shoemaker, quite proud at seeing the former error corrected, thanks to his advice, began to criticise the leg; upon which Apelles, full of indignation, popped his head out and reminded him that a shoemaker should give no opinion beyond the shoes, --a piece of advice which has equally passed into a proverbial saying.
O slavish man! will you not bear with your own brother, who has God for his Father, as being a son from the same stock, and of the same high descent? But if you chance to be placed in some superior station, will you presently set yourself up for a tyrant?
Be not hurried away by excitement, but say, "Semblance, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you."
Remember that man's life lies all within this present, as 't were but a hair's-breadth of time; as for the rest, the past is gone, the future yet unseen. Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.
In the morning, when thou art sluggish at rousing thee, let this thought be present; "I am rising to a man's work."
He said that men ought to remember those friends who were absent as well as those who were present.
There are many marvellous stories told of Pherecydes. For it is said that he was walking along the seashore at Samos, and that seeing a ship sailing by with a fair wind, he said that it would soon sink; and presently it sank before his eyes. At another time he was drinking some water which had been drawn up out of a well, and he foretold that within three days there would be an earthquake; and there was one.
Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.
'T is one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past.
Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Absent in body, but present in spirit.
The autobiographer can see himself as the only true historian in the sense that he is presenting the life of perennial humanity. In the narrower sense, he provides the raw material for the social historian, demonstrating what it was like to be imprisoned in a particular segment of time.
..the people of Tudor England, like the modern Irish, were great talkers. One imagines their speech as rapid, bubbling, both earthily exact and carelessly malapropistic. It was perhaps a McLuhanesque medium, itself its own message and it exhibited the essential function of language - to maintain social contact in the dark.... Speech, when you come to think of it, is not a very exact medium: it is full of stumblings and apologies for not finding the right word; it has to be helped out with animal grunts and the gestures which, one is convinced, represent man's primal mode of communication. Take speech as a flickering auditory candle, and the mere act of maintaining its light becomes enough. Tales, gossip, riddles, word-play pass the time in the dark, and out of these - not out of the need to recount facts or state a case - springs literature.
Perhaps every dystopian vision is a figure of the present, with certain features sharpened and exaggerated to a point of moral and a warning
There are two good reasons for writing much, if one can. The first is the need to earn; the second is the fear of an untimely death, which will prevent the half-formed books in one's mind from being realized. We know not the day nor the hour. I may be killed in a train accident when taking this present book to my publisher in London. You can see whether or not this happened by reading the blurb on the dust jacket
