Presence

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot - indeed must not - wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, and rationalized avarice and sanctified misunderstanding. 'Live', Nietzsche says, 'as though the day was here.' It is not society that is to guide and save the hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal - carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories but in the silences of his personal despair - Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty - Seneca

The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now - William Somerset Maugham

The difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous - D Potter

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday - Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed -Sister Mary Corita Kent

If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world - Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

For last year's words belong to last year's language, and next year's words await another voice. To make an end is to make a beginning - T.S. Eliot

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now - Rainer Maria Rilke