For the rational study of the law the blackletter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.

-Holmes, Oliver Wendell,Jr
  'The Path of the Law', in the Harvard Law Review,10:469.

We are always acting on what just finished happening. It happened at least1/30th of a second ago. We think we're inthe present, but wearen't.The present we know is onlya movie of the past.

-Kesey, Ken Elton
Quoted in Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool- Aid  Acid Test (1968), ch.11.

Les enfants n'ont ni passe¤   ni avenir, et, ce qui ne nous arrive gue'  re, ils jouissent du pre¤  sent. Children have neither past nor future. They live in the present, something which rarely happens to us.

-La Bruye'  re,Jean de
  LesCaracte'  res ou les m½urs de ce sie'  cle,'Del'homme', no.51.

   Not Eve, whose fault was only too much love, Which made her give this present to her dear, That what she tasted he likewise might prove, Whereby his knowledge might become more clear; He never sought her weakness to reprove With those sharp words which he of God did hear; Yet men will boast of knowledge, which he took From Eve's fair hand, as from a learned book.

-Lanyer, Aemilia
Salve Deus Ex Judaeorum,'Eve's  Apology in Defense of Women'.

Al the povere peple tho pescoddes fetten; Benes and baken apples thei broghte in hir lappe, Chibolles and chervelles and ripe chiries manye, And profrede Piers this present to plese with Hunger.

-Langland,William
c.1378   A description of the sin of Envy. Piers Plowman (B text), 'Passus 6,' l.291^4. (pescoddes = pea-pod, fetten = fetched, chibolles = spring- onions, chervelles = chervil, plese with Hunger = please hunger with)

Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present: fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.

-Lewis, C(live) S(taples)
  The Screwtape Letters, no.15.

   One usually understands the art of the past by applying the conventions of the present thus misunderstanding the art of the past.

-LeWitt, Sol
  'Sentences on Conceptual  Art', in  Art-Language, vol.1, no.1, May.

Happily, there is nothing in the laws of value which remains for the present or any future writer to clear up; the theory of the subject is complete.

-Mill,John Stuart
  Principles of Political Economy, with Some Applications to Social Philosophy.

Sothat finding myself at present inorabout onehundred and twenty degrees off east longitude from England, it bred in me a desire to proceed on the same easterly course till I had ended where I began, and so to have once made one circle round the globe of the earth, which would have been a voyage of voyages.

-Mundy, Peter
c.1640  Objections were raised and Mundy was unable to fulfil this aim. Travels (published c.1650).

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

-Nabokov,Vladimir
  Interview in Playboy,  Jan.

Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.

-Nabokov,Vladimir
  Interview in the Paris Review, Summer.

The politics of our society are a conversation in which past, present and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion properly prevail none permanently dominates, and on this account we are free.

-Oakeshott, Michael Joseph
  Rationalism in Politics.

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.

-Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair
  Inside the Whale,'My Country Right or Left'.

   'Who controls the past,'ran the Party slogan,'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'

-Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair
  Nineteen Eighty-Four, pt.1, ch.3.

Whatever our forefathers were, or whatever they did or suffered, or were enforced to yield unto, we are the men of the present age, and ought to be absolutely free from all kinds of exorbitancies, molestations, or arbitrary power.

-Overton, Robert
  Remonstrance to the House of Commons.

For the present at any rate, I must proceed alone. I must plough my own furrow aloneöbut before I get to the end of that furrow, it is possible that I may not find myself alone.

-Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of
On breaking from the Liberal Party, Jul.

En toi je vis, o  u' que tu sois absente; En moi je meurs, o  u' que je sois pre¤  sent. Tant loin sois-tu, toujours tu es pre¤  sente; Pour pre'  s que sois, encore suis-je absent. I live in you, wherever you are, when you are absent; I die in myself wherever I am. No matter how faraway you are, you are always present; And no matter how near you are, I am always absent.

-Sce'  ve, Maurice
  De¤  lie, no.144.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futuritycastsuponthepresent; thewordswhichexpress what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

-Shelley, Percy Bysshe
A Defence of Poetry.

She was cut off fromthe past and therefore did not live in the present. But suddenly, as she stood close against a pine tree and breathed in its sharp, bitter scent, a clear space opened to her childhood, as though a wind had sprung fromthesea, clearing a mist.It wasnot a memory from the past, it was the past itself, as alive, as real; and she knew that she and the child of forty years ago were the same person.

-Thomas, D(onald) M(itchell)
TheWhite Hotel, ch.4.

Why is itthat girls so constantlydothis, so frequentlyask men who have loved them to be present at their marriages with other men? There is no triumph in it. It is done in sheer kindness and affection. They intend to offer something whichshall softenand not aggravatethe sorrow that they have caused† I fully appreciate the intention, but in honest truth,I doubt the eligibility of the proffered entertainment.

-Trollope, Anthony
  John Eames.The Small House at Allington, ch.9.