Pastoral Resources

An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.

What I am interested in is the present time.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

It is not advantageous for Russia in its present state to fight against Chechnya. The army is a mess. It must be made combat ready. That will take time. Russia has a lot of economic, social and political problems much more important than Chechnya.

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

Well, I started conducting kind of by accident. I wanted to give myself a special birthday present for my fortieth birthday, and I was living in San Francisco at the time and I started attending some of the concerts and then simply dropping hints.

Everybody is just at the start of this huge process of trying to unravel what's going on with the 4,400, where they've been and why they're back and what they're trying to do with us in the present. And we're trying to work out what messages they're sending us.

Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order.

Our specious present as such is very short. We do, however, experience passing events; part of the process of the passage of events is directly there in our experience, including some of the past and some of the future.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

I think we present extreme aspects of human behavior and hopefully get at times, messages across or bring issues to the table or as we so often say, shed light into the dark crevices of human nature.

We could live at the present day without a Plato, but a double number of Newtons is required to discover the secrets of nature, and to bring life into harmony with the laws of nature.

A God is thinkable, therefore a God is also actually present.

It is a simple but sometimes forgotten truth that the greatest enemy to present joy and high hopes is the cultivation of retrospective bitterness.

We are ready to say that we rule the entire Elgin enterprise as irrelevant to the present.

In the past, when I shot films about fishermen and hunters, I always had to admire their ability to perceive time in its entirety. The present was always temporary.

Personally, I think that for example the chemical directive in its present form does too much damage to the chemical industry - especially the medium sized businesses - and will hurt our worldwide competitiveness.

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

As far as the targets hit by the Islamic attackers, I do not consider the WTC a U.S. institution, but the headquarters of most that's wrong with our present masters.