A Quote by Alexis de Tocqueville
As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.
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What you think of as they past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace -- and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is "borrowed" from the Now.
Obscurity, indeed, is painful to the mind as well as to the eye; but to bring light from obscurity, by whatever labour, must needsbe delightful and rejoicing.
While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.
I am convinced that the stratigraphic method will in the future enable archaeology to throw far more light on the history of American culture than it has done in the past.
If the mind wants to comprehend reality, it will have to come out of the past and the future. But coming out of the past and the future, it is no longer the mind at all. Hence the insistence of all the great masters of the world that the door to reality is no-mind.
By keeping the mind in the present, unless you deliberately want to contemplate the past or future, it's possible to firmly face life without fear. Then, no thoughts of past failures or future problems will exist in the mind, and a truly positive mental state will result-fudoshin, the "immovable mind".
I have gone from local obscurity to national obscurity to international obscurity. Once I learn how to monetize obscurity, I will be rich.
These tenses-past, present and future-are not the tenses of time; they are tenses of the mind. That which is no longer before the mind becomes the past. That which is before the mind is the present. And that which is going to be before the mind is the future. Past is that which is no longer before you. Future is that which is not yet before you. And present is that which is before you and is slipping out of your sight. Soon it will be past.
Whatever you are doing, don't let past move your mind;don't let future disturb you. Because the past is no more, and the future is not yet.
Diwali means to be in the present, so drop the regrets of the past and the worries of the future and live in the moment. It is a time to forget the bickering and negativities that have happened through the year. It is a time when you throw light on the wisdom you have gained and welcome a new beginning.
What man does not know,
Or has not thought of,
Wanders in the night
Through the labyrinth of the mind.
There was no cure for the human condition because every man read the present and plotted the future in the light of his own past.
the mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future
We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better.... or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do.... But at this precise moment, you also realize that you can change your future by bringing the past into the present. Past and future only exist in our mind. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.... It isn't what you did in the past the will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
Experience is a safe light to walk by, and he is not a rash man who expects to succeed in future from the same means which have secured it in times past.
Our present era, to my mind, is characterized by a profound forgetting of the past. "The future, the future, the future." The 21st century, all the technology obsession.
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