all.

When we are actually doing some great deed, or creating some immortal
work, we are not conscious of it as such; we think only of satisfying
present aims, of fulfilling the intentions we happen to have at the
time, of doing the right thing at the moment. It is only when we
come to view our life as a connected whole that our character and
capacities show themselves in their true light; that we see how, in
particular instances, some happy inspiration, as it were, led us to
choose the only true path out of a thousand which might have brought
us to ruin. It was our genius that guided us, a force felt in the
affairs of the intellectual as in those of the world; and working by
its defect just in the same way in regard to evil and disaster.

SECTION 5. Another important element in the wise conduct of life is to
preserve a proper proportion between our thought for the present and
our thought for the future; in order not to spoil the one by paying
over-great attention to the other. Many live too long in the
present--frivolous people, I mean; others, too much in the future,
ever anxious and full of care. It is seldom that a man holds the right
balance between the two extremes. Those who strive and hope and live
only in the future, always looking ahead and impatiently anticipating
what is coming, as something which will make them happy when they
get it, are, in spite of their very clever airs, exactly like those
donkeys one sees in Italy, whose pace may be hurried by fixing a stick
on their heads with a wisp of hay at the end of it; this is always
just in front of them, and they keep on trying to get it. Such people
are in a constant state of illusion as to their whole existence; they
go on living _ad interim_, until at last they die.

Instead, therefore, of always thinking about our plans and anxiously
looking to the future, or of giving ourselves up to regret for the
past, we should never forget that the present is the only reality, the
only certainty; that the future almost always turns out contrary to
our expectations; that the past, too, was very different from what
we suppose it to have been. But the past and the future are, on the
whole, of less consequence than we think. Distance, which makes
objects look small to the outward eye, makes them look big to the eye
of thought. The present alone is true and actual; it is the only
time which possesses full reality, and our existence lies in it
exclusively. Therefore we