
“The past, the present,
And the future,
Are all side by side,
Hand in hand”
Song lyrics
Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
“The past, the present,
And the future,
Are all side by side,
Hand in hand”
Song lyrics
Variant: People see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is and the future less resolved than it’ll be.
"The Genealogy of Animals", p. 85
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Physical Kinship
“Past is dead
Future is uncertain;
Present is all you have,
So eat, drink and live merry.”
Source: "Some Perplexities about time: with an attempted solution" (1925), p. 149. as cited in: Jonathan Gorman, "The transmission of our understanding of historical time." Historia Social y de la Educación 1.2 (2012): 129-152.
Thích Nhất Hạnh here quotes and interprets the "Ten Penetrations" of the Avatamsaka Sutra
The Sun My Heart (1996)
Context: The tenth penetration is, "All times penetrate one time. One time penetrates all times — past, present, and future. In one second, you can find the past, present, and future." In the past, you can see the present and the future. In the present, you can find the past and future. In the future, you can find the past and present. They "inter-contain" each other. Space contains time, time contains space. In the teaching of interpenetration, one determines the other, the other determines this one. When we realize our nature of interbeing, we will stop blaming and killing, because we know that we inter-are.
“The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.”
What Is Religion? (1899) is Ingersoll's last public address, delivered before the American Free Religious association, Boston, June 2, 1899. Source: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Dresden Memorial Edition Volume IV, pages 477-508, edited by Cliff Walker. http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/ingwhatrel.htm
Variant: The present is the child, and the necessary child, of all the past, and the mother of all the future.
“I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future.”
Preface to Humane Biology Projects (1961) by the Animal Welfare Institute
Context: I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives.