“The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows”

Variant: every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There's only now.
Source: The Passion

John Rivers in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
Context: You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.

Childe Roland to the dark Tower came, xxxiii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Source: The Fall of Freddie the Leaf: A Story Of Life For All Ages

Source: (1940), V

Source: Blood Promise

Collected Aphorisms
Context: Most of the time man does not do what he wills, but what he has willed. Through his decisions, he always gives himself only a certain direction, in which he then moves until the next moment of reflection. We do not will continuously, we only will intermittently, piece by piece. We thus save ourselves from willing: principle of the economy of the will. But the higher man always experiences this as thoroughly immoral.

IQ84 (2009-2010)
Variant: It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.
Source: 1Q84

Said to Braxton Bragg at Chickamauga, September 18-20, 1863. As quoted in May I Quote You, General Forrest? by Randall Bedwell.
1860s