Tense may refer to:
- Grammatical tense, a grammatical category expressing the time when a state or action denoted by a verb occurs
- Tenseness, a phonological quality frequently associated with vowels and occasionally with consonants
- Tense, a state of muscle contraction
Famous quotes containing the word tense:
“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 (b. 1929)
“Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I don’t think Dr. King helped racial harmony, I think he helped racial justice. What I profess to do is help the oppressed and if I cause a load of discomfort in the white community and the black community, that in my opinion means I’m being effective, because I’m not trying to make them comfortable. The job of an activist is to make people tense and cause social change.”
—Al, Reverend Sharpton (b. 1954)