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61 " From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing); or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation. "
― Thomas Henry Huxley , The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century
62 " I have sent books and music there, and all / Those instruments with which high spirits call / The future from its cradle, and the past / Out of its grave, and make the present last / In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, / Folded within their own eternity. "
― Percy Bysshe Shelley , Shelley's Poetry and Prose
63 " This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. "
― Michel Foucault , The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
64 " Know the word of God not in order that by doing so you might be saved; know it rather so that unlike the many you are not easily deceived. You may find that, evidently, a great many of the so-called novel ideas of the present were made without a clue that 'God', if you will, already laid profound discourse on or against them ages ago: no man has gone against God in such a way that God, from the beginning, did not already expect him to. Then, insofar as this, you will remain clear in that it is not at all that the Christian should be against newness; quite the opposite really - for a major point of Christianity is about one constantly being made new in Christ - it is only that many people are not actually bringing true newness to the table, and this is precisely because they do not first apply (or let alone even know) the wisdom of old. "
― Criss Jami , Healology
65 " The future, when it comes, is just like the present. The present is all you have and the opportunity of the present is worth more than the success of the past or the promise of the future. "
66 " People relates the process of evolution, as growth and success in the material world, rather in reality, the process of evolution, is all about, how you perceive life, with your understanding, in the present moment. "
― Roshan Sharma
67 " The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity. "
― Alfred North Whitehead
68 " It could be said that a liberal education has the nature of a bequest, in that it looks upon the student as the potential heir of a cultural birthright, whereas a practical education has the nature of a commodity to be exchanged for position, status, wealth, etc., in the future. A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past. The practical educators assume that human society itself is the only significant context, that change is therefore fundamental, constant, and necessary, that the future will be wholly unlike the past, that the past is outmoded, irrelevant, and an encumbrance upon the future -- the present being only a time for dividing past from future, for getting ready.But these definitions, based on division and opposition, are too simple. It is easy, accepting the viewpoint of either side, to find fault with the other. But the wrong is on neither side; it is in their division...Without the balance of historic value, practical education gives us that most absurd of standards: " relevance," based upon the suppositional needs of a theoretical future. But liberal education, divorced from practicality, gives something no less absurd: the specialist professor of one or another of the liberal arts, the custodian of an inheritance he has learned much about, but nothing from. "
69 " If I would expect better spiritual conditions to serve, I would not have started until the present moment. "
― Francisco Cândido Xavier
70 " The past has faded from memory, the present is where I live. I travel on. Who knows where I’m heading.Where am I? Faith lets me believe that the world is good. And those I meet on the way who walk with me for a while are good people too. I know.Just a little cross..That drifting traveller was from my village, that old path... whose memories I could not escape. My home shed tears without me. I have a nagging fear ... that I no longer belong to my home.I’m a man whose chosen journey, will stay the journey. Neither room here nor from there. I’m a man whose chosen journey, will stay the journey.That I stayed always did.I befriend milestones, the road knows me by my gait. Everyday.. the world feels the same everyday. I sell cities to people of leisure, I leave empty handed. I return empty handed. Everyday.. I’m becoming a stranger to myself everyday.. I’m a man whose chosen journey, will stay the journey. That I stayed always did.When I turned from village to city, turning bitter, like poison. Everyday.. I wish I could have been different everyday ... This age, This time, This road keeps passing by. I’m a man whose chosen journey, will stay the journey. That I stayed always did.I stayed!I stayed! "
71 " The problem with getting old was that each day had to compete with the thousands of others gone by. How wonderful would a day have to be to win such a beauty contest? To even make it into the finals? Never mind that memory rigged the game, airbrushed the flaws from its contestants, while the present had to shuffle into the spotlight unaided, all pockmarked with mundanities and baggy with annoyances. "
― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders
72 " One does not ask about one's true identity simply as a matter of course, but only in rather special circumstances. What this means, I believe, is that " who I really am" becomes an issue for me only when my system of values " breaks down," that is, only when I realize that the values according to which I have lived until now are insufficient to inform a life that I can recognize as satisfying. This realization can occur in variety of circumstances: when my beliefs about myself or the world undergo significant change; when I find that two of my values conflict in a fundamental way; or when, as in the present example, the relations among my previous commitments are insufficiently determinate to tell me what to do in the particular situation I face. "
73 " Don't let life's challenges discourage you. Some things are just out of your control. Make it work for you! The most painful lessons of the past can teach you how to survive in the present . "
― Carlos Wallace , Life Is Not Complicated-You Are: Turning Your Biggest Disappointments Into Your Greatest Blessings
74 " We cannot change the past. We can only take action in the present and, therefore, change the future. "
― Ken Poirot
75 " Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?" That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future. "
76 " For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. "
― C.S. Lewis , The Screwtape Letters
77 " The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich. "
― Jeanette Winterson , The Passion
78 " We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence. "
― Pierre-Simon Laplace
79 " For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are? "
― Ian McEwan , The Child in Time
80 " In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection. "
― Andrei Tarkovsky