Many of us try - and perhaps we succeed - for a few minutes, maybe an hour. Living in the present is great in theory but often tough in practice. Life is harried and we’re often “future tripping” about a million things at once.

Here are some quotes to remind you of your natural state, the state you existed in as a child - living in the here and now:

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future.  I live now.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.  ~Robert Nathan, So Love Returns

You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.  ~Jan Glidewell

Would you keep a chive on your tooth just because you enjoyed last night’s potato?  ~From the television show Boston Common

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.  ~Oscar Wilde

It’s but little good you’ll do a-watering the last year’s crops.  ~George Eliot, Adam Bede, 1859

We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today.  I don’t think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great.  If you’re hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.  ~Art Buchwald

Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.  ~Cherokee Indian Proverb

The past is a good place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.  ~Author Unknown

Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.  ~Edna Ferber

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.  ~Carl Sandburg, “Prairie,” Complete Poems, 1950

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.  ~Euripides, Alexander

The past is a guidepost, not a hitching post.  ~L. Thomas Holdcroft

We cannot carry our father’s corpse with us everywhere we go.  ~Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, 1913
People are always asking about the good old days.  I say, why don’t you say the good now days?  ~Robert M. Young

Having spent the better part of my life trying either to relive the past or experience the future before it arrives, I have come to believe that in between these two extremes is peace.  ~Author Unknown

“Old times” never come back and I suppose it’s just as well.  What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that’s better.  ~George E. Woodberry

Opportunities fly by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone.  ~Jerome K. Jerome, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 1889

Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead.  It is going on all the time.  ~Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Forever is composed of nows.  ~Emily Dickinson
Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are.  Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart.  Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow.  Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so.  One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world, your return.  ~Mary Jean Iron

You have to wake up a virgin each morning.  ~Jean-Louis Barrault