Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.

You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory

The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future

By living exclusively for the present, we let ourselves be hemmed in by an ocean of death. Conversely, by reviving the past, we enlarge our living space.

In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection.