Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is read more

Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live read more

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is
found in the effect was already in the read more

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is
found in the effect was already in the cause.

O God! Put back Thy universe and give me yesterday.

O God! Put back Thy universe and give me yesterday.

Listen to the Water-Mill:
Through the live-long day
How the clicking of its wheel
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Listen to the Water-Mill:
Through the live-long day
How the clicking of its wheel
Wears the hours away!
Languidly the Autumn wind
Stirs the forest leaves,
From the field the reapers sing
Binding up their sheaves:
And a proverb haunts my mind
As a spell is cast,
"The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past."

The best of prophets of the future is the past.

The best of prophets of the future is the past.

O Death! O Change! O Time!
Without you, O! the insufferable eyes
Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
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O Death! O Change! O Time!
Without you, O! the insufferable eyes
Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
These fatuous, ineffectual yesterdays.

O, to bring back the great Homeric time,
The simple manners and the deed sublime:
When the read more

O, to bring back the great Homeric time,
The simple manners and the deed sublime:
When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate,
Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight.

Not heaven itself upon the past has power;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my read more

Not heaven itself upon the past has power;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.