Robert Grudin Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Because we believe that one moment is more or less like the next, we lose touch with the essential urgency of the present, the fact that each passing moment is the one moment for the practice of freedom. Time and the Art of Living

2. To those of us who spend entire days, if not lifetimes, concentrating on a series of brief and insignificant things, the present has barely any meaning at all; we become tiny timorous things, caught in the inch of space between the in box and the out box. While we may share the common illusions about a mobile present and a free future, we spend most of our lives housecleaning the past – maintaining commitments, counterbalancing errors, living up to expectations, mopping up our own postponements. In this sense, as in others, we shuffle backward into the future, unaware of our enslavement to time or of the simple freedom of new beginnings. Time and the Art of Living

3. What do I mean by locked in time? I mean, first of all, that we characteristically view mobile phenomena in immobile terms. We see processes like love and education as established circumstances rather than as complex temporal organisms whose lives depend on regular nourishment and renewal. Conversely, we tend to accept our own fear, weakness and ignorance as chronic disabilities rather than facing them, as we should, with the awareness that they are temporary and surmountable. Like still cameras, our minds consistently convert motion into stasis. In our language about time we resort to rocklike absolutisms – creation, completion, means, end, permanence, annihilation – terms whose static and extreme implications make them poor approximations of history and experience… We have little use at all for that most subtle and suggestive of words, renewal. Time and the Art of Living