“Do you treat this moment as if it were an obstacle to be overcome? Do you feel you have a future moment to get to that is more important?
Almost everyone lives like this most of the time. Since the future never arrives, except as the present, it is a dysfunctional way to live. It generates a constant undercurrent of unease, tension, and discontent. It does not honor life, which is Now and never not Now.”

“Many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment, and imagine living your whole life like that. Always, this moment is not quite good enough because you need to get to the next one.”

“Nothing ever does happen in the future and nothing ever has happened in the past; the only happening is in the present moment. And yet people everywhere are so wrapped up in the past and future that the present moment tends to be overlooked. Yet this present moment is the only moment of reality; everything else is imagination. Now is the only time we can live. We can't live in the past, although some attempt it, and we can't live in the future. We live now or not at all.”

“I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living now.”

“Living is
a thing you do
now or never —
which do you?”

“The time is now, the place is here. Stay in the present. You can do nothing to change the past, and the future will never come exactly as you plan or hope for.”

“A man who worships in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church lives, psychologically, in a burning and continuous moment that never ends: the present is ever-lasting; the past is telescoped into the now; there is no future and at any moment Christ may come again and then the anxious tension of time will be no more…. [My grandmother] lived with all of us, yet, psychologically, she hovered somewhere off in space…. Always she seemed to be peeping out of Heaven into the world while living in the world.”

“I have always been a great believer in today. Most people live either in the past or in the future, so that they really never live at all. So many people are busy worrying about the future of art or society, they have no time to preserve what is. Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.”

“If you are living in the past or in the future, you will never find a meaning in the present.”

“One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.”