John Green Quotes

And imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

Why does everyone talk about the past? All that counts is tomorrow's game.

Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.

How we think about the future and the past determines everything about how we think about our situation as human beings.

Human's can't live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human's are always thinking about the future or the past.

Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

We ought to remember the past, yes -- but we shouldn't allow it to consume us. We live in the present moment, and some people are too tied to the ideals of that period to fully move forward. We'll never work through the future unless we accept the present. We must fill the twenty-first century with dreams.

The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim.

I don't want to look back-I want to keep looking ahead. I'd hate for my defining moment to be my past.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

The past is behind, learn from it. The future is ahead, prepare for it. The present is here, live it.

Life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future.

You can't base your life on the past or the present. You have to tell me about your future.

I spend so much time like living in the past or the future. I mean, I think most people do, really. And the moments when you're really present in your life can be pretty rare, really.

One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future.

The future is what matters — because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present — like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.

The way you see your future determines your thinking today. You're thinking today determines your performance today. Your performance in the today of your life determines your future.

On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many, many moments. Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not this moment? This one moment, now, is the only thing you can never escape from. The one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens. No matter how much your life changes. One thing is certain. Its always now. Since there is no escape from the now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it.

As long as we have some definite idea about or some hope in the future, we cannot really be serious with the moment that exists right now.

Have you noticed," she asked him, "how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?

Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You don't want what you've got, and you want what you haven't got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don't want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.

It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.

Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment; and furthermore, that he can have no other life except the one he loses.