A Quote by Samuel Butler
It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity. The time present is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.
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The present time is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.
It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity.
No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.
It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart—never the sensation of the moment.
Some men […] choose to seek greatness, while others are forced to it. It is always better to choose than to be forced. A man who is forced is never completely his own master. He must dance on the strings of those who forced him.
The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed. The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise of imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own Eco-systemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination.
Fishing seems to be divided, like sex, into three unequal parts: anticipation and recollection and, in between, actual performance.
But I account the use that a man should seek of the publishing of his own writings before his death, to be but an untimely anticipation of that which is proper to follow a man, and not to go along with him.
If you desire something, you don't have it. It is more interesting than enjoyment, because enjoyment erases the mysteries and the vision of desire. Desire opens up possibilities but never achieves anything, whereas enjoyment is just the brutal achievement of something - and after that, it's done.
The whole of God is present at every point in space at the same time. Take time to meditate on this great idea. In other words, God doesn't come and go. God doesn't capriciously move substance from God's supply "up there" to fill your needs "down here." Nor does God answer prayer in some kind of coming forth. God is always present, totally present - as a Presence.
That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.
You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer.
Desire is the uneasiness a man finds in himself upon the absence of anything whose present enjoyment carries the idea of delight with it.
All futurity seems teeming with endless destruction never to be repelled; Desperate remorse swallows the present in a quenchless rage.
I don’t think we ever really live in the present; instead, we’re either just this side of the past or future, wavering anxiously between anticipation and recollection. That’s where I lived my life, always wanting, longing, wishing.
We all spend so much time worrying about the future that the present moment slips right out of our hands. And so all we have left is retrospection and anticipation, retrospection and anticipation. In which case what's left to recall but past anticipation? What's left to anticipate but future retrospection?
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