“One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.”
A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)
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Gaston Bachelard35
French writer and philosopher 1884–1962Related quotes
Ralph Ellison book Shadow and Act
Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), Introduction, p. xix; in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 56.
“To remain in the past means to be dead.”
José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist
“To be ignorant of the past is to remain a child.”
Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science
Cicero
Misattributed
Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist
Variant: Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.
“Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.”
Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) English political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant
