#present

I think music needs to be presented in a way so that kids can grasp songs, dances, simple music that's associated with some particular defining moment in human experience. ↗

— Michael Tilson Thomas

#dances #defining #defining moment #experience #grasp

The great secret about goals and visions is not the future they describe but the change in the present they engender. ↗

— David Allen

#future #goals #present #change

The only way for you to know that you can really make a change is by knowing the future. ↗

— Toba Beta

#future #knowing #present #change

True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded. ↗

— Siri Hustvedt

#past #present #stories #change

You've got to seize the opportunity if it is presented to you. ↗

— Clive Davis

#opportunity #presented #seize #you

In magic - and in life - there is only the present moment, the now. You can't measure time the way you measure the distance between two points. 'Time' doesn't pass. We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we're always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better, about the consequences of our actions, and about why we didn't act as we should have. Or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do tomorrow, what precautions we should take, what dangers await us around the next corner, how to avoid what we don't want and how to get what we have always dreamed of. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#life #living-in-the-moment #past #present #time

If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#hope #pragmatism #present #dreams

Today is a fantasy for tomorrow has gone and yesterday is here! ↗

— Munia Khan

#fantasy #present #today #dreams

I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without pause a future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to any other. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#present #education

. . . at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance ... not that I'm interested in reassuring people - bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it. ↗

— Dennis Potter

#celebrate #comfort #death #importance #now