Quotes by British Authors - Page 14

The present like a note in music is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.
Walter Savage Landor
If we open a quarrel between the past and the present we shall find we have lost the future.
Winston Churchill
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.
Samuel Johnson
Youth is the time of getting middle age of improving and old age of spending.
Anne Bradstreet
Take in the ideas of the day drain off those of yesterday. As to the morrow time enough to consider it when it becomes today.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
We can easily manage if we will only take each day the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday's burden over again today and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.
John Newton
No mind is much employed upon the present recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.
Samuel Johnson
This-the immediate everyday and present experience-is IT the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
Alan Watts
The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground for it is the past and it is the future.
Alfred North Whitehead
One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.
D.H. Lawrence
He who lives in the present lives in eternity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
One of these days is none of these days.
H. G. Bohn
You had better live your best and act your best and think your best today for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrows that follow.
Harriet Martineau
Happy the man and happy he alone He can call today his own. He who secure within can say "Tomorrow do thy worst for I have lived today."
Henry Fielding
The here-and-now is no mere filling of time but a filling of time with God.
John Foster
I believe that only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.
Storm Jameson
People are always asking about the good old days. I say why don't you say the good "now" days? Isn't "now" the only time you're living?
Robert M. Young
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
Virginia Woolf
Our deeds still travel with us from afar and what we have been makes us what we are.
George Eliot
The past is a foreign country they do things differently there.
Leslie Poles Hartley
The past is a work of art free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
Max Beerbohm
That sign of old age extolling the past at the expense of the present.
Sydney Smith
The past is but the beginning of a beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
H.G.Wells
Anyone who limits her vision to memories of yesterday is already dead.
Lillie Langtry
Fear not for the future weep not for the past.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
Alfred North Whitehead
It's but little good you'll go a-water-ing the last year's crop.
George Eliot
Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad.
Christina Rossetti
The past is a funeral gone by.
Edmund Gosse
Truth however bitter can be accepted and woven into a design for living.
Agatha Christie
We can never go back again that much is certain. The past is still too close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again and that sense of fear of furtive unrest... might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.
Daphne du Maurier
Past: Our cradle not our prison and there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration not imitation for continuation not repetition.
Israel Zangwill
The past is the best prophet of the future.
Lord Byron
Ah tell me not that memory Sheds gladness o'er the past What is recalled by faded flowers Save that they did not last?
Letitia Landon
The past is the best way to suppose what may come.
Lord Halifax
The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.
Alfred North Whitehead
This strange disease of modern life with its sick hurry its divided aims.
Matthew Arnold
The "good old times"-all times when old are good.
Lord Byron
To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye to restore it and to render it more fit for its prime function of looking forward.
Margaret Fairless Barber
Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind as of opening the mouth is to shut it again on something solid.
G.K. Chesterton
What we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.
Aldous Huxley
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.
Joseph Conrad
Minds like bodies will often fall into a pimpled ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.
Charles Dickens
Of all modern notions the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home they say is dead decorum and routine outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.
G.K. Chesterton
I am not absent-minded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
G.K. Chesterton
To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.
Max Beerbohm
Then comes Winston with his hundred horsepower mind and what can I do?
Stanley Baldwin
The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it all the past as well as all the future.
Joseph Conrad
I got the blues thinking of the future so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.
D.H. Lawrence
A house may draw visitors but it is the possessor alone that can detain them.
Charles Caleb Colton
The home of everyone is to him his castle and fortress as well for his defence against injury and violence as for his repose.
Edward Coke
I want a house that has got over all its troubles I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.
Jerome K. Jerome
Strike when thou wilt the hour of rest but let my last days be my best.
Robert Browning
The surroundings householders crave are glorified autobiographies.
T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings
He who lives in the future lives in a featureless blank he lives in impersonality he lives in Nirvana. The past is democratic because it is a people. The future is despotic because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction just as each man is alone in a dream.
G.K. Chesterton
Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.
Robert Browning
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour whatever he does whoever he is.
C.S. Lewis
The future is only the past again entered through another gate.
Arthur Wing Pinero
Tomorrow is the day when idlers work and fools reform and mortal men lay hold on heaven.
Edward Young
The future is the shape of things to come.
H.G.Wells