“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
Gospel of Matthew, c. 80 AD · words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount
Chapter 4
On Presence
“This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”
Book of Psalms, c. 500 BC · Hebrew songbook
“Seize the present; trust tomorrow even as little as you may.”
Horace, c. 23 BC · Roman lyric poet
“While we are postponing, life speeds by.”
Seneca the Younger, c. 64 AD · Roman Stoic writing to his friend Lucilius
“Every man lives only this present time, which is an indivisible point, and all the rest of his life is either past or it is uncertain.”
Marcus Aurelius, c. 175 AD · Roman emperor and Stoic
“God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.”
Henry David Thoreau, 1854 · American naturalist at Walden Pond
“Forever is composed of Nows. It is not a different time.”
Emily Dickinson, 1862 · American poet of Amherst
“Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees takes off his shoes.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1856 · English poet
Across thousands of moment-by-moment reports, minds wandered nearly half the time, and a wandering mind predicted less happiness than whatever the person was actually doing.
Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, 2010 · psychologists who sampled daily experience
People who habitually attend to what is happening right now report higher well-being, and brief training in that attention lifted mood in daily records.
Kirk Warren Brown and Richard Ryan, 2003 · psychologists who built the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale
Free to read, always. Liking a verse or leaving a comment happens in the app, so the conversation has a name attached to it.