Stephen Dobyns Quotes

If I am incapable of washing dishes joyfully, if I want to finish them quickly so I can go and have dessert, I will be equally incapable of enjoying my dessert. With the fork in my hand, I will be thinking about what to do next, and the texture and flavor of the dessert, together with the pleasure of eating it, will be lost. I will always be dragged into the future, never able to live in the present moment.

If we are forever yearning for more time, we are forever discounting what is offered.

That is my problem with life, I rush through it, like I'm being chased. Even things whose whole point is slowness, like drinking relaxing tea. When I drink relaxing tea I suck it down as if I'm in a contest for who can drink relaxing tea the quickest.

The quality of your moments produces the quality of your life. So, as thoughts come and go and the waves of mind rush on, Carpe punctum-Seize this moment. It deserves your full attention, for it will not pass your way again.

Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing.... Through all that haste I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. Most of us spend fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past, with regret for lost joys or shame for things badly done (both utterly useless and weakening) or in a future which we either long for or dread. . . . There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute, here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle. Which is exactly what it is-a miracle and unrepeatable.

Each thing I do, I rush through, so I can do something else.

This moment is your life. It is the process of living, the journey, that is life itself, and we often wish away our lives by focusing only on what tomorrow could, should, would bring.

If you spend all of your time racing ahead to the future, you're liable to discover you've left a great present behind.

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

It isn't the great big pleasures that count the most; it's making a great deal out of the little ones--I've discovered the true secret of happiness, Daddy, and that is to live in the now. Not to be for ever regretting the past, or anticipating the future; but to get the most that you can out of this very instant.

Life is so urgent it necessitates living slow.

Most humans live in the mindset that this moment is only important because it's getting them to the next one.

The most heartbreaking thing of all is how we cheat ourselves of the present moment.

Everyone rushes his life on, and suffers from a yearning for the future and a boredom with the present. But that man who devotes every hour to his own needs, who plans every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears tomorrow.

The present is burdened too much with the past. We have not time, in our earthly existence, to appreciate what is warm with life, and immediately around us.

If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday, and worries over what might happen tomorrow, we have no today in which to live.

We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.

There's no destination. There's no getting anywhere. There's just the going. The key to life is to make the going really fun. Because people that are like, “If I just get to this, then boom!” And then they get there and there's this dawning of an afterwards. Whereas I'm just always in the going. And it's not a frantic going like, “I gotta keep going or I'm gonna go nuts!” I can not do anything for weeks or months if I need to and just sit and read books or watch movies. I'm just as fine consuming and absorbing new art as I am trying to make it. But it's all in the going.

In this moment, you have everything you need, and life is just a series of moments.

Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Let's be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.

Waiting is a state of mind that says we want what we don't have. Therefore, with every kind of waiting we produce an inner conflict between now and the projected future. This greatly reduces the quality of our life. Are you a 'habitual waiter'?

Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.

Quit worrying about how everything is going to turn out. Live one day at a time; better yet, make the most of this moment. It’s good to have a big – picture outlook, to set goals, to establish budgets and make plans, but if you’re always living in the future, you’re never really enjoying the present in the way God wants you to.

When you stay in the moment, you have all the time in the world, and whatever needs to be done will be completed in the exact right time.