A Quote by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

My hold on the past and the future is precarious and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn, further developments in order to be understood.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Quote Topics

Always Fully Further Future Hold Horizon May Moment More My Own Never Order Own Past Possession Postponed Precarious Reached Since Stage Time Turn Understand Understood Until Would Would Be

Quote Author

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
French - Philosopher
March 14, 1908 - May 4, 1961

I've reached the stage of my life where learning is so important to me. I go through the past enough when I play my old songs on stage. And I don't mind doing that. But I want to think about the future.

Elton John

While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

Claude Levi-Strauss

How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.

Saint Augustine

My whole life at a certain point was studio, hotel, stage, hotel, stage, studio, stage, hotel, studio, stage. I was expressing everything from my past, everything that I had experienced prior to that studio stage time, and it was like you have to go back to the well, in order to give someone something to drink. I felt like a cistern, dried up and like there was nothing more. And it was so beautiful.

Lauryn Hill

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.

Paulo Coelho

What we are left with then is the present, the only time where miracles happen. We place the past and the future as well into the hands of God. The biblical statement that “time shall be no more” means that we will one day live fully in the present, without obsessing about past or future.

Marianne Williamson

Well, we think that time "passes," flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.

Ursula K. Le Guin

I love being on stage. There's nothing better than that feeling; ever since the first time I was on stage, I was like, 'Oh, this is what it means to be fully alive and satisfied.' I don't think anything's as satisfying as a play.

Mickey Sumner

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly. . . Live each moment completely and the future will take care of itself. Fully enjoy the wonder and beauty of each moment.

Paramahansa Yogananda

The past is an interpretation. The future is on illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead, time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.

Shams Tabrizi

The stage floor was a stage of thin ice for me to tread. To hold my own or to sink through and die, never to be remembered.

Eartha Kitt

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

Larry Wall

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

Blaise Pascal

In the spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense. The past and the future are both rolled up in this present moment of illumination, and this present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on.

D.T. Suzuki

Try as they may to savor the taste of eternity, their thoughts still twist and turn upon the ebb and flow of things in past and future time. But if only their minds could be seized and held steady, they would be still for a while and, for that short moment, they would glimse the splendor of eternity, which is forever still.

Saint Augustine

While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern.