“The Great Western Disease is that we fixate on the future at the expense of enjoying the life we're living now.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

Source: What Got You Here Won't Get You There, 2008, p. 81 (2010 edition)

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Marshall Goldsmith 8

American author of leadership and management literature 1949

Paul P. Enns (1937) American theologian

Source: Heaven Revealed (Moody, 2011), p. 16

“For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Mir schien: Ausgesprochene Unlust, mich über Dinge des praktischen Lebens, Zukunft, Daten, Politik zu unterhalten. Man ist an die intellektuelle Sphäre gebannt wie manchmal Besessene auf die sexuelle, ist von ihr angesaugt.
"Main features of my first impression of hashish" (18 December 1927), On Hashish (2006), p. 21
Main features of my first impression of hashish (1927)

“The quality of life to be enjoyed or the existence to be survived by our children and future generations is in our hands now.”

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921) member of the British Royal Family, consort to Queen Elizabeth II

The World Wildlife Fund Congress, London, (1970)
The Environmental Revolution: Speeches on Conservation, 1962–77 (1978)
Context: It is an old cliche to say that the future is in the hands of the young. This is no longer true. The quality of life to be enjoyed or the existence to be survived by our children and future generations is in our hands now.

“Now the great temptation of life and the great tragedy of life is that so often we allow the without of our lives to absorb the within of our lives. The great tragedy of life is that too often we allow the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Keep Moving From This Mountain (1965)
Context: Each of us lives in two realms, the "within" and the "without." The within of our lives is somehow found in the realm of ends, the without in the realm of means. The within of our [lives], the bottom — that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion for which at best we live. The without of our lives is that realm of instrumentalities, techniques, mechanisms by which we live. Now the great temptation of life and the great tragedy of life is that so often we allow the without of our lives to absorb the within of our lives. The great tragedy of life is that too often we allow the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.