Tense Quotes

• Holding on to anger, resentment and hurt only gives you tense muscles, a headache and a sore jaw from clenching your teeth. Forgiveness gives you back the laughter and the lightness in your life.

  Joan Lunden

  Forgiveness, Hurt, Laughter

  51 Copy quote

• Exercise is really important to me - it's therapeutic. So if I'm ever feeling tense or stressed or like I'm about to have a meltdown, I'll put on my iPod and head to the gym or out on a bike ride along Lake Michigan with the girls.

  Michelle Obama

  Girl, Exercise, Lakes

  Michelle Obama, Lisa Rogak (2009). “Michelle Obama: In Her Own Words”, p.55, PublicAffairs

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• Winners live in the present tense. People who come up short are consumed with future or past. I want to be living in the now.

  Alex Rodriguez

  Sports, Winning, Past

  7 Copy quote

• Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Imperfect, Existence, Present Tense

  Friedrich Nietzsche “Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche”, Delphi Classics

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• People tend to vote the present tense - not the subjective.

  Diane Sawyer

  People, Literature, Subjectivity

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• Nothing is Improbable until it moves into the Past Tense.

  George Ade

  Time, Moving, Past

  "Hand-made Fables".

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• Loved. You can't use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all.

  Ken Kesey

  Past, Doe, Use

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• The atmosphere is so tense, if Elvis walked in, with a portion of chips... you could hear the vinegar sizzle on them.

  Sid Waddell

  Redneck, Atmosphere, Vinegar

  "Sid Waddell's quotes: 13 of the best" by Lizzy Davies, www.theguardian.com. August 12, 2012.

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• If I speak of Vienna it must be in the past tense, as a man speaks of a woman he has loved and who is dead.

  Erich von Stroheim

  Past, Men, Vienna

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• You cannot look at a sleeping cat and feel tense.

  Jane Pauley

  Sleep, Cat, Animal

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• Do not be tense, just be ready, not thinking but not dreaming, not being set but being flexible.

  Bruce Lee

  Dream, Thinking, Mma

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• I get irritated, nervous, very tense or stressed, but never bored.

  Catherine Deneuve

  Bored, Stressed, Irritated

  53 Copy quote

• A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

  Hans Magnus Enzensberger

  Writing, Thinking, Doe

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• Who's not sat tense before his own heart's curtain.

  James Russell Lowell

  Heart, Anxiety, Curtains

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• Of the mental hazards, being scared is the worst. When you get scared, you get tense.

  Sam Snead

  Hazards, Anticipation, Scared

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• Politics is history in the present tense.

  John Avlon

  Present Tense

  "John Avlon and Margaret Hoover, Political pundits". Landon Lecture, www.k-state.edu. April 15, 2016.

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• Forgiveness gives you back the laughter and the lightness in your life.

  Joan Lunden

  Forgiveness, Hurt, Laughter

  22 Copy quote

• Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.

  Camille Paglia

  Nature, Imagination, Action

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

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• Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen?
  I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was.

  Helen Keller

  Inspirational, Heart, Knowledge

  Helen Keller (2012). “The Story of My Life”, p.15, Courier Corporation

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• Confidence is the present tense of hope.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Present Tense

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• When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.

  Deborah Levy

  Feels, Happened, Happens

  "Things I Don't Want to Know by Deborah Levy - review" by Kate Kellaway, www.theguardian.com. August 11, 2013.

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• We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp.

  Brian D. McLaren

  God, Christian, Humble

  76 Copy quote

• Holding on to anger only gives you tense muscles.

  Joan Lunden

  Wisdom, Warrior, Giving

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• Carl Jung tells in one of his books of a conversation he had with a Native American chief who pointed out to him that in his perception most white people have tense faces, staring eyes, and a cruel demeanor. He said: “They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We don't know what they want. We think they are mad.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Book, Native American, Eye

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”, p.75, New World Library

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• What libraries give you is all three tenses - the past tense - the present tense in which we live and the future that we can only imagine. These places have teachers who are living and dead and we are lucky to have them. If I sit here and read Aristotle, he is speaking to me across a thousand years - more than a thousand years. That sense that I am in the company of the great greatest people who ever lived is a humbling experience but a liberating experience.

  Pete Hamill

  Teacher, Past, Years

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