The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
Henry Ellis

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.
Zora Neale Hurston

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
Alan Watts

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
Alan Watts

Man is born passionate of body, but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of Good in his main-spring of Mind. But God help us all! It is at present a sad jar of atoms.
Lord Byron

There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.
David Hume

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.
William Arthur Ward

But for me to have the opportunity to stand in front of a bunch of executives and present myself, I had to hustle in my own way. I can't tell you how frustrating it was that they didn't get that. No joke - I'd leave meetings crying all the time.
Kanye West

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.
Carter G. Woodson

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.
Thomas Merton

God exists in eternity. The only point where eternity meets time is in the present. The present is the only time there is.
Marianne Williamson

We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not extending in the present.
Marianne Williamson

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.
Epictetus

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal

Any one reflecting upon the thought he has of the delight, which any present or absent thing is apt to produce in him, has the idea we call love.
John Locke

There is some pleasure even in words, when they bring forgetfulness of present miseries.
Sophocles

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld