There’s no present. There’s only the immediate future and the recent past.

It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don’t want victories anymore.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

This is the first age that’s ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

I look forward to a great future for America – a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.

I was at a New Year’s Eve party, and someone asked me how was my year, and I said, ‚I honestly think 2011 was the best year of my entire life,‘ and I actually meant it.

In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.

Let us sacrifice our today so that our children can have a better tomorrow.

It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.

Some day, following the example of the United States of America, there will be a United States of Europe.

Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.

Time can behave like another direction in space under extreme conditions.

The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.

When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people – along with despair about its future.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish.

Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.

The person who doesn’t scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.

The symbolism of the climate strike is that if you adults don’t give a damn about my future, I won’t either.

The mind that is anxious about the future is miserable.

One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.

Contemplation of life after retirement and life after death can help you deal with contemporary challenges.

Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

There have been times that I’ve wept as I’ve gone from city to city and I’ve seen how far people have wandered from God.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

When someone is impatient and says, ‚I haven’t got all day,‘ I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.