Moment

“ It was that wonderful moment when, for lack of a visible horizon, the not yet darkened world seems infinitely greater—a moment when anything can happen, anything be believed in. To me, watching, listening, hovering, there came a dreadful purpose and a dreadful courage. ”

“ But the moment the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. ”

“ From earth to man, from man to earth,
—It is the hour of feeling.
One moment now may give us more
Than fifty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.
Some silent laws our hearts may make. ”

“ For them, the brightness that for others is dissipated over long years of the future, was concentrated into the single intense moment of the present—this one moment, that seemed to burst into bud and blossom, the fruition of a lifetime. ”

“ The moment of His appearance, the moment of His death, the moment of His return, the moment of His perfect triumph, has not yet arrived, not even yet! And yet, at every moment the time is accomplished, every hour is the fullness of time, on condition that the workers are ready. ”

“ Strange how few,
After all's said and done, the things that are
Of moment. ”

“ The perfect moment across the dialect of life, the moment of perfect life, must be in truth that in which we touch the confines of our being, look upon our world, all in all, as revealed in some great moment, and see that it is good—that we grasp it, possess it, that it is akin to us, that it is identical with our deepest wills. ”

“ Each active moment is an amalgam of sentiments and wills and multiple elements which split apart as soon as the purpose is achieved. The moments of its duration then scatter through space and time, taking with them remains of their charged sounds, colours, and scents, with atmospheres of joy or sadness not fully perceptible by our limited senses, but certainly to be opined, and almost to be felt. ”

“ In other words, that to the Supreme Being, all the past, all the present, all the future of the universe, must be as but a single thought in a single moment of time—an instantaneous act of consciousness. ”

“ Before all times thy time of being was;
And yet in time thy human birth began,
Lest we should fade, untimely, like the grass,—
Thou that hast said thy word should never pass,
And thou that dost all times begin and end,—
Vouchsafe thy comfort to my sad soul send.
G. Ellis.
A moment is a mighty thing,
Beyond the soul’s imagining,
For in it, though we trace it not,
How much there crowds of varied lot!
How much of life, life cannot see,
Darts onward to eternity! ”

“ This is the moment of creation; everything clears up; the mist dissipates, becomes peopled and animated; there is movement, agitation, not of empty shadows but of substantial forms which cross and interlace in every direction. ”

“ MOMENTS IN LIFE. By moments in life, I mean certain periods which occur more or less frequently in our history,—when the spirit in which we then live, the step we then take, the word we then utter, or what we at that moment think, resolve, accept, reject, do, or do not, may give a complexion to our whole future being both here and hereafter. ”

“ Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming. ”

“ In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. ”

“ We speak of ourselves as acting "from the impulse of the moment," from habit, or "as we always do under such circumstances." Let any one, for instance, review in his mind the events of yesterday, from the first moment of awakened consciousness until he sank into slumber at night, and remember, if he can, before how many of the ten thousand actions which constituted his daily life he paused to choose. ”

“ This was the experience, then, of ‘distinct pre-eminence’ in whose recollection his mind was ‘nourished and invisibly repaired.’ It is in such a moment that the soul’s strength is shown; when common objects evoke what he calls the imagination, the reality, of which they are a suggestion. ”

“ Here pause we for the present—as even then That awful pause, dividing life from death, Struck for an instant on the hearts of men, Thousands of whom were drawing their last breath! A moment—and all will be life again! ”

“ It might be said that the sight of the moment is merely a theme upon which we embroider the memories of former likings, former aspirations, former habits, images that we have cared for, and through which we indicate to others our training, our race, the entire educated part of our nature. ”

“ You may usefully employ the moment which yet remains to you; almost all those, whose departure from this world you are daily witnessing, allow it to slip from them, and die without having reaped any advantage from it. ”

“ Curiosity governs the first moment; and the second moment is all œconomy to justify the expence of the first——and for the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth moments, and so on to the day of judgment—’tis a point of Honour. ”

“ To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. ”

“ We do not realize the importance of moments. Only let us consider those two sayings of God about them, ‘In a moment shall they die,’ and, ‘We shall all be changed in a moment,’ and we shall think less lightly of them. Eternal issues may hang upon any one of them, but it has come and gone before we can even think about it. ”

“ Indeed, if the first moment in the life of the Spirit be man's apprehension of Eternal Life, the second moment—without which the first has little worth for him—consists of his response to that transcendent Reality. ”

“ And so God's moments come to us; every one of them—if we had eyes to see and hands to grasp—a crisis, affording opportunity for something for which all eternity will not afford a second opportunity, if the moment be let pass. ”

“ The shadow of the passions of the moment traversed this grand and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things. ”

“ A moment's thinking is an hour in words,— ”

“ But the moment when a man makes up his mind to change the direction in which his face is set will always be a moment, however long may be the hesitation, and the meditation, and the preparation that led up to it. ”

“ For the moment, what we attend to is reality; ”

“ Assume that this day as a whole is already known as an individual, and then this moment, timed by my watch, has its place in the day’s wholeness. In general, give me one individual, and I have my ποῦ στῶ, and can know other individuals of the same type to an indefinite extent. ”

“ But what minutes! Count them by sensation and not by calendars, and each moment is a day and the race a life. ”

“ Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after a long time. ”

“ Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause, now possession is required, and the power to swell the moment from the resources of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble relations. ”

“ In the first place, whether one lives or dies I hold, and have always held, to be of infinitely less moment than is generally supposed. But, if life is to be, then it is common sense to amuse yourself with the best you can find where you happen to be placed. ”

“ The world’s time is thus in all respects a generalized and extended image and correspondent of the observed time of our inner experience. In the time of our more direct experience, we find a twofold way in which we can significantly call a portion of time a present moment. The present, in our inner experience, means a whole series of events grasped by somebody as having some unity for his consciousness, and as having its own single internal meaning. ”

“ Every moment of the future being dependent upon and involved in the present moment, sooner or later in the course of time there would come a moment similar in every detail to a moment that had already existed, thus guaranteeing a similar series of moments till it should recur, and so on. ”

“ They can muse over the events of past years. They can contemplate the mysteries of the future. The most momentous period of life is about at hand—that time when they will exchange this life for another. ”

“ What becomes of all our emotions, our impressions," he pursued after a long pause, "all the material of thought that life pours into us at such a rate during such a memorable three months as these? There are twenty moments a week—a day, for that matter, some days—that seem supreme, twenty impressions that seem ultimate, that appear to form an intellectual era. ”

“ If it survives that moment, then the next moment is there for it. That is its own reward: to go on living for one more moment. This is the way the body is functioning now. Don't bother inventing philosophies of the moment, situational models, and all that. ”

“ THE HOUR-HAND OF LIFE.—Life consists of rare single moments of the greatest importance, and of countless intervals during which, at best, the phantoms of those moments hover around us. Love, the Spring, every fine melody, the mountains, the moon, the sea—all speak but once fully to the heart, if, indeed, they ever do quite attain to speech. For many people have not those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony of actual life. ”

“ To me the most momentous episodes of life appear to resolve themselves naturally into first occasions. Those times at which we first feel, think, act, or experience in any given way, form the true stepping-stones of life. ”

“ she held in her hands for one brief moment the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole, and entire from the confusion of chaos. ”

“ Those touching them are supposed to show the events that are happening at the present moment, those far from them are in the past, or the future, depending whether they are above or below the two important ones. ”

“ The first may be called the golden moments of life, which seem somehow in their transient brevity to atone for the dull exasperation of interminable mediocre hours: moments of triumph in the struggle, moments of fierce exultant resolve; moments of joy in nature—moments which defy oblivion in the memory, and which, being priceless, cannot be too dearly bought. ”

“ Thus it is that when we stretch our view through immense vistas of time past, or when we look forward through immeasurable ages of time to come, the alteration in the length of the day will assume the most startling proportions, and involve the most momentous consequences. ”

“ In like manner, we find it necessary to hold that consciousness essentially occupies time; and what is present to the mind at any ordinary instant, is what is present during a moment in which that instant occurs. ”