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This grave dissociation of past and present is the generic fact of our time and the cause of the suspicion, more or less vague, which gives rise to the confusion characteristic of our present-day existence. We feel that we actual men have suddenly been left alone on the earth; that the dead did not die in appearance only but effectively; that they can no longer help us. Any remains of the traditional spirit have evaporated. Models, norms, standards are no use to us. We have to solve our problems without any active collaboration of the past, in full actuality, be they problems of art, science, or politics. The European stands alone, without any living ghosts by his side; like Peter Schlehmil he has lost his shadow. This is what always happens when midday comes.
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"The Dehumanisation of Art"; Ortega y Gasset later used this passage in The Revolt of the Masses (1929), quoting it in Ch. III: The Height Of The Times

 

Jose Ortega y Gasset

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The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. The past and future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking of it at this present moment, or because it influences you so that you, as a living being in the present, are that much different. The future has reality because one can bring it into his mind in the present. Past was the present at one time, and the future will be the present at some coming moment. To try to live in the "when" of the future or the "then" of the past always involves an artificiality, a separating one's self from reality; for in actuality one exists in the present. The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound.

 

Rollo May

 

Contempt for science could perhaps depend on the fact that, science hasn’t been able to solve any of our basic problems, for example the environmental pollution or the problems with HIV and AIDS. This is the worst disease of our time, and scientists are lost. I believe that many people are disappointed with science when the answers we need are not delivered.

 

Bjorn Ulvaeus

 

We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that’s of no use to the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It’s always new.

 

Paulo Coelho

 

This was the past and it was the dead past; there were only corpses in it — and perhaps not even corpses, but the shadows of those corpses. For the dead trees and the fence posts and the bridges and the buildings on the hill all would classify as shadows. There was no life here; the life was up ahead. Life must occupy but a single point in time, and as time moved forward, life moved with it. And so was gone, thought Blaine, any dream that Man might have ever held of visiting the past and living in the action and the thought and the viewpoint of men who'd long been dust. For the living past did not exist, nor did the human past except in the records of the past. The present was the only valid point for life — life kept moving on, keeping pace with the present, and once it had passed, all traces of it or its existences were carefully erased.

 

Clifford D. Simak

 

Since Christ is the absolute it is easy to see that in relation to him there is only one situation-the situation of contemporaneity. Christ is revealed only to faith. … The qualification that is lacking-which is the qualification of truth (as inwardness) and of all religiousness is-for you. The past is not actuality-for me. Only the contemporary is actuality for me. That with which you are living simultaneously is actuality-for you. Thus, every human being is able to become contemporary only with the time in which he is living-and then with one more, with Christ’s life upon earth, for Christ’s life upon earth, the sacred history, stands alone by itself, outside history. History you can read and hear about as about the past; here you can if it so pleases you, judge by the outcome. But Christ’s life on earth is not a past; it did not wait at the time, eighteen hundred years ago, and does not wait now for the assistance of the outcome. A historical Christianity is nonsense and un-Christian muddled thinking, because whatever true Christians there are in any generation are contemporary with Christ, have nothing to do with Christians in past generations but everything to do with the contemporary Christ. Christ’s life on earth has an eternal contemporaneity. … If you cannot prevail upon yourself to become a Christian in the situation of contemporaneity with him, or if he cannot move you to draw you to himself in the situation of contemporaneity, then you will never become a Christian.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard