"There are ways to really live in the present moment. What's the alternative? It is always now. However much you feel you may need to plan for the future, to anticipate it, to mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. This may sound trite … but it's the truth. … As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. I think this is a liberating truth about the human mind. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand about your mind than that, if you want to be happy in this world. The past is a memory. It's a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated, it is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment. And this. And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth. Repudiating it. Fleeing it. Overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Sam Harris, "Death and the Present Moment", speech at the Global Atheist Convention (April 2012)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Now
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Now
170 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Now →
Related Quotes
"A young man who had been troubling society with impalpable doctrines of a new civilization which he called "the Kingd…"
"Economics is on the side of humanity now."
"Joy! Joy! I triumph! Now no more I know Myself as simply me. I burn with love Unto myself, and bury me in love."
"What I cannot do now is the sign of what I shall do hereafter. The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all pos…"
""I exist" does not follow from "there is a thought now." The fact that a thought occurs at a given moment does not en…"
"Initiation leads to the mount whence vision can be had, a vision of the eternal Now, wherein past, present, and futur…"
"The majority of us control our physical bodies consciously, making them carry out our behests upon the physical plane…"
"I, who have not cried since my childhood, I cry now like a child because of all that I shall never have. I cry over l…"
"I have searched, I have indistinctly seen, I have doubted. Now, I hope."
"dreamtree,truthtree tree of jubilee:with aeons of (trivial merely)existence,all when may not measure a now of your tr…"