The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is.
This moment in which you experience stillness is every moment. Don't let the mind seduce you into the past or future. Stay in the moment, and dare to consider that you can be free now.
Do not pursue the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. The past no longer is. The future has not yet come. Looking deeply at life as it is. In the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom. We must be diligent today. To wait until tomorrow is too late. Death comes unexpectedly. How can we bargain with it? The sage calls a person who knows how to dwell in mindfulness night and day, 'one who knows the better way to live alone.'
All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines.
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that
Yes, and even for the past...that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was. Something I can accept. Mistakes made by the self I had to be or was not able to be.
Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists.
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.
It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
I established the rule that once we hire an employee, his school records are a matter of the past and are no longer used to evaluate his work or decide on his promotion.