Quotations:

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave…” — Henry David Thoreau

This famous quotation is taken from a letter of April 24, 1859:

Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this.

What a great, poetic evocation of the Epicurean motto of “carpe diem”!

You can read the full text here on Walden.org.