It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.
Franz Kafka

Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.
Michel de Montaigne

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
Golda Meir

There is no one right now in my judgment that can unite the Black electorate in such a way to present our agenda to a nominee to have them forthrightly address our concerns.
Louis Farrakhan

The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, and the last duty done.
George MacDonald

The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments' plans.
Benjamin Disraeli

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.
Benjamin Disraeli

Most wars, after all, present themselves as humanitarian endeavors to help people.
Howard Zinn

Endure the present, and watch for better things.
Virgil

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.
Charles Baudelaire

The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility.
Martin Heidegger

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
Norman Mailer

We just want to win. That's the bottom line. I think a lot of times people may become content with one championship or a little bit of success, but we don't really reflect on what we've done in the past. We focus on the present.
Derek Jeter

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.
Aeschylus

Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.
Harriet Beecher Stowe

The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.
Bill Watterson

The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind.
Thomas Hobbes

Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present. Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have made.
Bill Watterson

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
Vladimir Nabokov