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Life is a succession of
moments.
To live each one is to succeed.
Corita Kent |
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now 2
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What we are talking about is learning to
live in the present moment, in the now.
When you
aren't distracted by your own negative thinking, when you
don't
allow yourself to get lost in moments that are gone
or yet to come,
you are left with this moment. This
moment--now--truly is the only moment you have.
It
is beautiful and special. Life is simply a series
of such moments to be experienced
one right after another.
If you attend to the moment you are in
and stay
connected to your soul and remain happy,
you will find
that your heart is filled with positive feelings.
Sydney Banks
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The past
is gone, and I don't know what's coming in the future. It's obvious
that if I want my life to be whole, to
resonate with feeling and integrity
and value and health,
there's only one way I can influence the future: by
owning the present. If I can relate to this
moment with integrity,
and then this moment with
integrity, and then this moment with integrity,
wakefully,
then the sum of that is going to be very different over
time,
over mind moments that stretch out into what we
call a life, than a life
that is lived mostly on
automatic pilot, where we are reacting
and being
mechanical and are therefore somewhat numb.
Jon
Kabat-Zinn
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We do not
remember days, we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese |
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Hold to the now, the here,
through which all future plunges to the past.
James Joyce |
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This--this was what
made life: a moment of quiet,
the water falling in the
fountain, the girl's voice. . .
a moment of captured
beauty.
Those who are truly wise will never
permit such
moments to escape. |
Louis
L'Amour |
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We
have only this moment, sparkling like a star
in our hand.
. . and melting like a snowflake.
Let us use it
before it is too late.
Marie Beynon Ray |
Every second is of infinite value.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
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I live
now and only now, and I will do what I want to do this
moment
and not what I decided was best for me yesterday.
Hugh Prather |
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The
passing moment is all we can be sure of;
it is only
common sense to extract its utmost value from it.
W. Somerset Maugham
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Love
the moment and the energy of the moment
will spread
beyond all boundaries.
Corita Kent |
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Life
is not lost by dying; life is lost minute
by minute, day
by day, in all
the thousand small, uncaring ways.
Stephen Saint Vincent Benet |
To finish the moment, to find the
journey's end
in every step of the road, to live the
greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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But what
minutes! Count them by sensation,
and not by calendars,
and each moment is a day.
Benjamin Disraeli |
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It is privilege of living to be . . .
acutely, agonizingly conscious
of the moment that
is
always
present and always passing.
Marya Mannes |
Our latest moment is always our
supreme moment. Five minutes delay
in dinner now
is more
important
than a great sorrow
ten years gone.
Samuel Butler |
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I have the happiness of the
passing moment,
and what more can mortal ask?
George R. Gissing |
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Each moment is magical,
precious and complete and will never exist again.
We forget that
now is the moment we are in, that the next one isn't guaranteed.
And if we are blessed with another moment, any joy, creativity or
wisdom
it brings will ensue from the way we live in the present one.
Susan L.
Taylor
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My philosophy is that not
only are you responsible
for your life, but doing your best at this
moment
puts you in the best place for the next moment.
Oprah Winfrey |
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The
only time that any of us have to grow or change or feel or learn
anything
is in the present moment. But we're continually
missing
our present moments,
almost willfully, by not paying
attention.
Jon
Kabat-Zinn |
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If
we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try;
If we don't, it doesn't matter, we'd better start to die.
Wystan
Hugh Auden |
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Every
person's life lies within the present,
for the past is spent and done
with,
and the future is uncertain.
Marcus
Antonius |
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A
single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our
prospects brighten
on the influx of greater thoughts. We should
be blessed if we lived in the present always,
and took advantage of
every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses
the
influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our
time in atoning
for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call
doing our duty. We loiter in winter
while it is already spring.
Henry
David Thoreau |
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Do we
need to make a special effort to enjoy the beauty of the blue sky?
Do we have to practice to be able to enjoy it? No, we just enjoy
it.
Each second, each minute of our lives can be like this.
Wherever we are, any time, we have the capacity to enjoy the sunshine,
the presence of each other, even the sensation of our breathing.
We don't need to go
to China to enjoy the blue sky.
We don't have to travel into the
future to enjoy our breathing.
We can be in touch with these
things right now.
Thich Nhat Hanh |
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To
be reborn hourly and daily in this life, we need to die--to give of
ourselves wholly
to the demands of the moment, so that we utterly
"disappear".
Thoughts of past, present, or future, of
life and death, of this world and the next,
are transcended in the
superabundance of the now. Time and timelessness coalesce:
this is the moment of eternity. Thus our every act is a matter
either
of giving life or taking it away. If we perform each act
with total absorption,
we give life to our life. If we do things
half-heartedly, we kill that life.
Philip
Kapleau |
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On
Arturo Toscanini's eightieth birthday, someone asked his son, Walter,
what his father ranked as his most important achievement.
The son replied, "For him there can be no such thing.
Whatever he happens to be doing at the moment is the biggest thing in
his life--
whether it is conducting a symphony or peeling an orange."
Ardis
Whitman |
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There is only the
moment. The now. Only what you are experiencing at this
second is real.
This does not mean you live for the
moment. It means you live in the moment.
Leo Buscaglia |
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You
don't get to choose how you're
going to die. Or
when. You can
only decide how you're going to
live. Now.
Joan
Baez |
Life
can take place only in the
present moment. If we lose
the present moment, we lose life.
Buddha |
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The
present moment is never intolerable. It is always what is coming in
fine minutes
or five days that makes people despair. The Law of Life
is to live in the present,
and this applies to both time and place. Keep your attention to the present moment,
and in the place where your
body is now. Do a fair day's work, and then stop.
Overwork is not
productive in the long run.
Emmet Fox |
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Only
one person in a thousand knows the trick
of really living in the
present. Most of us spend
fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past,
with regret for lost joys or shame for things badly
done (both utterly
useless and weakening) or in
a future which we either long for or
dread. . . .
There is only one minute in which you are
alive, this
minute, here and now.
The only way
to live is by accepting each minute as an
unrepeatable miracle. Which is exactly what
it is—a miracle and unrepeatable.
Storm Jameson |
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Are
you present in this moment, right here, right now?
Or are you remembering what you didn't do yesterday,
thinking about what you have to do tomorrow,
regretting what you did last week. If you are in any of these
places,
you are not here, right now in the fullness of this moment.
The richness of the present is here. The fullness of now is
present.
If you are not here now, it means you could be missing the love,
joy, peace and brand-new ideas that are here right now.
Why not take a moment to gather yourself, to pull yourself together,
to collect all of your thoughts and feelings in this time and place?
Iyanla
Vanzant
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What are you going to do?
Are you going to keep looking
backwards, full of anger,
resentment and unfulfilled desire.
Or are you going to be here now.
Because everything is available
for you in the here and now.
Love, compassion, silence, bliss
and Oneness.
Leonard
Jacobson |
The moment is what you are in.
Like a sword the moment cuts away
everything around itself so that it can
be free. The sword is gentle to
the touch and its edge is sharp.
Those who handle it gently
are unharmed. But those who
treat it roughly are injured.
Qushayri |
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Too
many people not only try to hold on to happiness, but they
try to recapture happiness from times before. "You can't
go home again" is a very true saying, for truly going home would
be an attempt to recapture the past. The past is gone, and
today is here. We're older and wiser and more capable of taking
all we can from the present moment, so here the
present moment is--what are you waiting for?
tom
walsh |
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No
longer forward nor behind
I look in hope or fear;
But, grateful, take the good I find,
The best of now and here.
John
Greenleaf Whittier |
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To a large degree, the measure of our peace of mind
is determined by
how much we are able to live in the present moment. Irrespective
of what
happened yesterday or last year, and what may or may not happen
tomorrow, the present moment is where you are--always!
Richard
Carlson |
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You
may have heard about living today, tomorrow, or "tonow."
Tonow,
children tell us, is a gift, which is why we call it "the
present."
Children understand that tonow is the place to live. The present
is really the only moment we have. Sure, bad things can happen
in the tonow. But when bad things happen to children, they show
us the way again, because they know how to be
in touch with their feelings and needs.
Bernie
Siegel |
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Our suffering
stems from ignorance. We react because we do not know what
we are doing, because we do not know the reality of ourselves.
The mind spends
most of the time lost in fantasies and illusions, reliving pleasant or
unpleasant
experiences and anticipating the future with eagerness or fear.
While lost in such
cravings or aversions, we are unaware of what is happening now, what
we are
doing now. Yet surely this moment, now, is the most important
for us. We cannot
live in the past; it is gone. Nor can we live in the future; it
is forever beyond our
grasp. We can live only in the present. If we are unaware
of our present actions,
we are condemned to repeating the mistakes of the past and can never
succeed
in attaining our dreams for the future. But if we can develop
the ability to be
aware of the present moment, we can use the past as a guide for
ordering our
actions in the future, so that we may attain our goal.
S.N. Goenka |
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