Quotes about the past

page 12

“Because in the end nothing is worse than seeing the fall of one you loved. It was somehow worse than losing a love. It made everything seem questionable. It made the past bitter and confused.”

“Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”

“To remain in the past means to be dead.”

“I learned that what happened to me did not have to define who I was. My past could not control my future unless I allowed it to.”

“My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.”

“There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.”

“To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds”

“The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative. A large amount of reminiscence is, by common consent, conceded to the drowning man; and it is not past belief that one may review an entire courtship while removing one's gloves.”

“They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.”

“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”

“I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.”

“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.”

“Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past.”

“The older we get the more we seem to think that everything was better in the past.”

“There is no past. Past is present when you carry it with you.”

“Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”

“Still, looking through the old volumes was soothing, because thinking of the past made the present seem a little less real.”

“Even bipolar vampires needed sleep from time to time, and he was well past his recommended safe dosage of stress.”

“Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.”

“What is past is past. never go back. Not for excuses. Not for justification, not for happiness. You are what you are, the world is what it is.”

“And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.”

“Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.”

“It was never too late to learn something. The past is unalterable in any event. The future is the only thing we can change. Learning the lessons of the past is the only way to shape the present and the future.”

“That's the past for you. Not only does it come back at the most unexpected, and inconvenient, times but it's set in stone.”

“Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write a new one.”

“Don't beat yourself up over what you could have or should have done. The past is gone. Move on to the future.”

“The two most important phrases in the human language are "If only" and "Maybe someday". Our past mistakes and our unrequited longings. The things we regret and the things we yearn for. That's what makes us who we are.”

“To quote the Tsalagi, you should never allow your yesterday to use up too much of today. The past is gone and tomorrow is at best a maybe. Live for this moment because it may be all you'll ever have.”

“It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.”

“I am your brother. I was supposed to be your brother before either of us was born. Karmic debt. It appears I was Vlad the Impaler or Genghis Khan in a past life.”

“In circumstances of real tragedy you see things straight away… past, present, and future together.”

“Everything that happened in the past "It was all necessary to bring us to where we are.”

“It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.”

“Out of the nursery into the college and back into the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”

“If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.”

“Never regret your past. Rather,
embrace it as the teacher that it is.”

“If you leave, we lose and our pasts win.”

“The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is to
release the images and emotions, the grudges and fears, the
clingings and disappointments of the past that bind our
spirit.”

“It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.”

“I think we agree, the past is over.”

“The decisions of our past are the architects of our present.”

“If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.”

“One of the most dynamic and significant changes you can make in your life is to make the commitment to drop all negative references to your past, to begin living now.”

“When we recall Christmas past, we usually find that the simplest things - not the great occasions - give off the greatest glow of happiness.”

“God surpasses our dreams when we reach past our personal plans and agenda to grab the hand of Christ and walk the path he chose for us.  He is obligated to keep us dissatisfied until we come to him and his plan for complete satisfaction.”

“What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?”

“Haven't you ever wished that you could steal back just a few hours of your past?" she asked softly. "That's all I want… just a little taste of what might have been.”

“These are all I have. I do not have the wide, bright beacon of some solid old lighthouse, guiding ships safely home, past the jaggedrocks. I only have these little glimmers that flicker and then go out.”

“… She'd gone past interest, swung into attraction, burst through lust, tripped over affection, and was now skidding out of control into love.”

“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”

“Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us, and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us.
Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me, unrelentingly to rage on”

“Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.”

“I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.”

“The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.”

“In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”

“I just don't see why the past has to matter.”

“The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct”

“You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same.”

“time past and time future
what might have been and what has been
point to one end, which is always present.”

“I can’t undo the past. But in the future, I will gladly lay my life down for you, brother. (Styxx)”

“What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.”

“I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.”

“So you decided to help us by killing the guy we were talking to?" Clary demanded "Because you thought he had a shady past? Who- who does that? It doesnt make any sense.”

“History is a Rorschach test, people. What you see when you look at it tells you as much about yourself as it does about the past.”

“You can't run from feelings, Charity. You have to face them. Otherwise your future will look just like your past.”

“You can’t go back, Ever. You can’t change the past. It just is…. This is our destiny. Not yours.”

“Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it'd really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.”

“God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.”

“You can’t change the past, it just is”

“A person who doesn't learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation.”

“Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].”

“Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.”

“And I mouth into the phone,, in case some of her cells pick up on the vibrations and it serves me well in the next life. If there is one. If there is a next life, I hope it's in the past; I don't think the future will be any more handleable.”

“They're a dark people with a gift for suffering way past their deserving. It's said that without whiskey to soak and soften the world, they'd kill themselves. (Irish)”

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.”

“In the past, I had particularly loved her smell. She always smelled freshed, freshly washed or of freshed laundry or fresh sweat or freshly loved”

“It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.”

“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.”

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.”

“Our children may learn about the heroes of the past. Our task is to make ourselves the architects of the future.”

“Some people live as though they are already dead. There are people moving around us who are consumed by their past, terrified of their future, and stuck in their anger and jealousy. They are not alive; they are just walking corpses.”

“There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there.”

“I won’t lie. I want to beat the hell out of any man who’s had you—you’d be smart to keep them the hell away from me—but nothing in your past can change how I feel about you.”

“I’d planned to kill them, too.” When Néomi glared up at him, he raised his chained hands.
“Past tense. See? Already I’m improving.”

“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”

“I curled myself into a ball and cried quietly, doing that thing that only young people can do, namely, feeling sorry for myself. Once you're past thirty you lose that ability; instead of feeling sorry for yourself you turn bitter.”

“I wanted so much to forget the past, but it wouldn't go away, it hung around like an open wound that refused to scar over, an open window that no amount of muscle could shut.”

“I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present.”

“No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.”

“It's funny how close the past is, sometimes. Sometimes it seems as if you could almost reach out and touch it. Only who really wants to?”

“The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.”

“The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace.”

“What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?”

“Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.”

“A million and a half of people spread over the Atlantic seaboard might be thought no great number; but it was a new thing in the world. …which had in fact been carefully noted by Benjamin Franklin in a pamphlet on The Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.—that within three-quarters of a century the population of the continental colonies had doubled every twenty-five years, whereas the population of Old England during a hundred years past had not doubled once and now stood at only some six and a half millions. …With these facts in mind, one might indeed say that a people with so much vitality and expansive power was abundantly able to pay taxes; but perhaps it was also a fair inference, if any one was disposed to press the matter, that unless it was so minded, such a people was already, or assuredly soon would be, equally able not to pay them.”

“The biggest mistake of past centuries in teaching has been to treat all children as if they were variants of the same individual, and thus to feel justified in teaching them the same subjects in the same ways.”

“As for one-party rule, it was questioned neither by the Left Opposition nor by the Right [wing of the Communist party]. All were prisoners of their own doctrine and their own past: all had worked with a will to create the apparatus of violence that crushed them. Bukharin’ s hopeless attempt to form a league with Kamenev was no more than a pitiful epilogue to his career. In November 1929 the deviationists performed a public act of penance, but even this did not save them. Stalin’ s victory was complete; the collapse of the Bukharinite opposition meant the triumph of autocracy in the party and in the country. In December 1929 Stalin’ s fiftieth birthday was celebrated as a major historical event, and from this point we may date the "cult of personality". Trotsky’ s prophecy of 1903 had come true: party rule had become Central Committee rule, and this in turn had becorne the personal tyranny of a dictator.”

“Jordan also takes seriously our moral obligations to others. Despite scarce resources, the people of Jordan have opened their arms to refugees fleeing regional violence. Jordan has taken in thousands of Iraqi Christians over the past year. This is in addition to giving shelter to 1.4 million Syrian refugees, which is 20 per cent of the population, over the past few years. This is more than the equivalent of France hosting the entire population of Belgium. My small country is now the world’s third-largest refugee host and I thank all of you who are helping us to uphold this global responsibility.”