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Present Quotes

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Present Quotes

“We were standing by the window, the mist pressed and broke in waves against the panes—and I felt that behind it lurked again the secret, the hidden, the past things, the damp days of horror, the desolation, the filth, the shreds of a waste life, the perplexity, the misguided frittering away of strength in an aimless existence; but here, before me in the shadow, disconcertingly near, the quiet breathing, the unseizable present—warmth, clear living—I must hold it, I must win it.”

“When Mathematics unfold through Origamis, when video games target Medicine and Education, when architecture embraces nature, when we defy gravity, when physics dance, and dance clubs play Einstein, when we stop playing war, when TV starts saying something, when we produce without wasting, when engineering meets humanity’s primary needs, when all of these are not just casualties, but a standard we all live UP to: Then we’ll know. I’ll know: we really live in the 21st century”

“Whenever you are angry, take a beautiful object in your house and smash it to pieces. The pity you feel for what you have done is silly compared to what you are doing to your mind: taking a sacred moment to be alive and desecrating it by being angry.”

“This is an ode to life. The anthem of the world. For as there are billions of different stars that make up the sky so, too, are there billions of different humans that make up the Earth. Some shine brighter but all are made of the same cosmic dust. O the joy of being in life with all these people! I speak of differences because they are there. Like the different organs that make up our bodies. Earth, itself, is one large body. Listen to how it howls when one human is in misery. When one kills another, the Earth feels the pang in its chest. When one orgasms, the Earth craves a cigarette. Look carefully, these animals are beauty spots that make the Earth’s face lovelier and more loveable. These oceans are the Earth’s limpid eyes. These trees, its hair. This is an ode to life. The anthem of the world. I will no longer speak of differences, for the similarities are larger. Look even closer. There may be distances between our limbs but there are no spaces between our hearts. We long to be one. We long to be in nature and to run wild with its wildlife. Let us celebrate life and living, for it is sacrilegious to be ungrateful. Let us play and be playful, for it is sacrilegious to be serious. Let us celebrate imperfections and make existence proud of us, for tomorrow is death, and this is an ode to life. The anthem of the world.”

“Madness is like being primitive once again and going back to the ancient era when there was no language, no clothes to wear, no ready-made food to eat, no cozy shelter to take rest in and no future to plan about. Only the ‘present’ was present with a struggle to survive. But, the only difference between a ‘primitive man’ and a ‘mad man’ is that the former had a ‘reasonable’ mind with some unreasonable traits and the latter has an ‘unreasonable’ mind with many unreasonable and possibly some reasonable traits!”

“That’s it; that’s how it is; everyone standing around as if just out of the pool, drying off, standing around, that’s it, standing, talking, shuffling back and forth on the deck of the present before the boat slowly pulls away into the future. Because it hurts to say goodbye, to pull your body out of the warm water; to step out of the pocket of safety, clinging to what you knew, or what you thought you knew about yourself and others.”

“Wendell explains that my pain feels like it's in the present, but it's actually in both the past and the future. Therapists talk a lot about how the past informs the present- how our histories affect he ways we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past. If we don't accept the notion that there's no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck. Changing our relationship to the past is a staple of therapy. But we talk far less about how our relationship to the future informs the present too. Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past. In fact, Wendell continues, I've lost more than my relationship in the present. I've lost my relationship in the future. We tend to think that the future happens later, ut we're creating in our minds every day. We the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it.”

“I believe that anytime someone messes with the mind, they mess with the soul. Historically they go hand-in-hand, for a long time ago, the word "mind" was another word for "soul". Contextually, people might not see the relationship between the mind and such events from the past and present, but there is a connection. They all involved tampering of the value of the mind.”

“Our digital devices and the outlooks they inspired allowed us to break free of the often repressive timelines of our storytellers, turning us from creatures led about by future expectations into more fully present-oriented human beings. The actual experience of this now-ness, however, is a bit more distracted, peripheral, even schizophrenic than that of being fully present. For many, the collapse of narrative led initially to a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder—a disillusionment, and the vague unease of having no direction from above, no plan or story. But like a dose of adrenaline or a double shot of espresso, our digital technologies compensate for this goalless drifting with an onslaught of simultaneous demands. We may not know where we're going anymore, but we're going to get there a whole lot faster. Yes, we may be in the midst of some great existential crisis, but we're simply too busy to notice.”

“I met a boy whose eyes showed me that the past, present and future were all the same thing.”

“You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.”