A Quote by Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

Genius, like a torch, shines less in the broad daylight of the present than in the night of the past.

Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

Quote Topics

Broad Daylight Genius Less Like Night Past Present Shines Than Torch

Quote Author

Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
Swiss - Novelist
1792 - 1870

Truth, like a torch, the more it's shook it shines.

William Hamilton

Truth like a torch, the more 'tis shock, it shines.

Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.

Marcel Pagnol

Third, consider the insistency of an idea. The insistency of a past idea with reference to the present is a quantity which is less, the further back that past idea is, and rises to infinity as the past idea is brought up into coincidence with the present.

Charles Sanders Peirce

You think you're safe. Until you see a picture like that. And then you know you'll always be a slave to the present because the present is more powerful than the past, no matter how long ago the present happened.

Ann-Marie MacDonald

You have to keep being curious. The notion that the present is different than the past, and the future will be different than the present, and the present is past, as we say it. I think I, by nature, am an optimist. Maybe I was driven to escape from my childhood and to be something, create my own world or career the way I wanted it to be. And I keep doing that in very interesting ways.

Les Wexner

Each American generation passes the torch of truth, liberty and justice in unbroken chain all the way down to the present. That torch is now in our hands, and we will use it to light up the world.

Donald Trump

Living in the present moment requires discretion toward memory. Without memory we'd have amnesia. What good would there be in that? Offer discretion and discernment for our past with a broad spectrum of forgiveness. As for our present moment, delight. And dedication to remain fully present to all the possibility.

Mary Anne Radmacher

I remember driving home from a movie - it wasn't 'Halloween' but another one, maybe the original 'Omen' - and I dropped my friends off, and it was also broad daylight, and yet I was sure that, like, Damien was in the backseat or something like that.

Thomas Gibson

We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use to the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It's always new.

Paulo Coelho

We think that the world is limited and explained by its past. We tend to think that what happened in the past determines what is going to happen next, and we do not see that it is exactly the other way around! What is always the source of the world is the present; the past doesn't explain a thing. The past trails behind the present like the wake of a ship and eventually disappears.

Alan Watts

But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past - or more accurately, pastness - is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Sentimentality and nostalgia are closely related. Kissing cousins. I have no time for nostalgia, though. Nostalgics believe the past is nicer than the present. It isn't. Or wasn't. Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.

Mal Peet

In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.