Quotes about the past

page 9

“Oh God, without them [libraries], what have we? We have no past and we have no future.”

“There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.”

“The past does not equal the future.”

“I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.”

“Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past, let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”

“No past. No future. Just present. Give it a chance.”

“They're already taking my future! They can't have the things that mattered to me in the past!”

“I did have regrets these past six months,” he told me quietly. “I found it a curse as much as a blessing, all that time to think. About the things I could have said, that I should have told you  .  .  .”

“So many words get lost. They leave the mouthand lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past.”

“Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory”

“And if you were always spending your time getting over your past, how were you supposed to get on with your future?”

“Plans let past drives the future.”

“Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.”

“Visit your soul; don't visit your past.”

“True friends share everything, except the past before they met.”

“The past doesn't go away. You just can't see it anymore.”

“Every new & successful example therefore of, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that.

[]”

“The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”

“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”

“Then how about one kiss?' he said with a sexy grin. 'Something to remember me by?'

'I’ll give you something to remember me by,' I said. The back of my head.' I pushed past him and escaped through the door to freedom.”

“Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It's so easy in the past tense.”

“It makes you a different person, to not have a past. It eats away at who you are, until what’s left is all construct, all artifice.”

“But you cannot change your past, no matter how you craft your future.”

“My past was a private obstacle, not a public excuse.”

“The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.”

“Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it”

“The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on.”

“The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go?”

“Remember? Ohh, I wouldn't do that! Remembering's dangerous. I find the past such a worrying, anxious place.

"The past tense", I supposed you'd call it. Ha ha ha.”

“Life is not a race to restore a past situation. Nor does one have to hurry to meet the future. Seeing how things change is what makes life interesting.”

“Simon watched a kelpie skip past, carrying a glass of blue fluid, and raised an eyebrow.
“It’s not like Magnus’s party,” Isabelle reassured him. “Everything here ought to be safe to drink.”
“Ought to be?” Aline look worried.”

“A past may chase you if you try to escape from it… but once you confront it, it's just an old memory inside you. There's nothing to be afraid of.”

“Things change, people change, but that doesn't mean you should forget the past.”

“We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.”

“Only the weak blame their past for the faults they find in their present; the strong acknowledge the effects of their past and then move on from it. We are all free to choose whether we will be weak or strong.”

“How beautiful life is and how sad! How fleeting, with no past and no future, only a limitless now.”

“The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.”

“The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.”

“Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, expunge the dead weight of our past.”

“I find now, swallowing one teaspoon
of pain, that it drops downward
to the past where it mixes
with last year’s cupful
and downward into a decade’s quart
and downward into a lifetime’s ocean.
I alternate treading water
and deadman’s float.”

“That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!”

“There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves”

“I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?" She studied him, her eyes grave. "Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.”

“She looked at her own past, and, for the first time, she forgave herself: it hadn't been
her fault, but the fault
of that insecure little boy, who had given up after the first attempt.”

“We are all what our pasts have made us,” Catarina said. “The accumulation of thousands of daily choices. We can change ourselves, but never erase what we’ve been.”

“He willed his body to remain unaffected. Sabin would fuss if Strider sported a hard-on around his precious. And, of course, "fuss" meant Strider would find his intestines wrapped around his neck, breathing a thing of the past.”

“He'd felt like a jack-o-lantern for the past few days, as if his guts had been yanked out with a fork and dumped in a heap while a grinning smile stayed plastered on his face.”

“In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.”

“Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.”

“I past another telkhine, who was so startled he dropped his Lil' Demons lunch box. I left him alive - partly because he had a cool lunch box…”

“I'm going to tell you a secret. Our lives are shaped by the future, not by the past. Once you decide how you want your life to be, all you need to do is live into that future.”

“You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.”

“Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”

“Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.”

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”

“I believe in God--in spite of God! I believe in Mankind--in spite of Mankind! I believe in the Future--in spite of the Past!”

“Most men's awareness doesn't extend past their dinner plates.”

“The past is another land, and we cannot go to visit. So, if I say there were dragons, and men who rode upon their backs, who alive has been there and can tell me that I'm wrong?”

“I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence.”

“For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.”

“I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.”

“I’d rather welcome change than cling to the past.”

“… A scar signifies past pain, a wound that did not heal as it ought. But it testifies, too, to survival…(Here be Dragons)”

“Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill.”

“And the kittykats would have to erect scaffolding and a pulley to get him down. Mind you, I wouldn't put that past them. Sometimes when they are behind the sofa supposedly purring, I think they are drilling.”

“Without a past you can't have a future.”

“It is all falling indelibly into the past.”

“There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.”

“The Master said, “A true teacher is one who, keeping the past alive, is also able to understand the present.”
(Analects 2.11)”

“It's important to know the past, but your survival depends on knowing the present.”

“What happens in the past, is in the past. But don't be surprised if it comes back and haunts you.”

“I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.”

“Adina gave a little shriek. "That fish just swam past my leg! Creepy! Where did it go?"

"To your right! Two o'clock! Get it!"

"You are officially the most bloodthirsty vegetarian ever.”

“Prolong not the past
Invite not the future
Do not alter your innate wakefulness
Fear not appearances
There in nothing more than this”

“The rules of reason build towers that reach past the treetops. The rules of trust build towers that reach past the stars.”

“What is now in the past was once in the future”

“It's hard for me, a Jew, to stay in the moment. Without the past, where is the guilt? And without the future, where is the dread? And without guilt and dread, who am I?”

“One faces the future with one's past.”

“There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”

“Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past — let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”

“But Valentine, why despair, why always paint the future in such sombre hues?" Maximilien asked.

"Because, my friend, I judge it by the past.”

“Harry," she said quietly, "I know you must be angry."

I burn things to ash and smash holes in buildings when I'm angry," I said. "I'm a couple of steps past that point right now.”

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

“Funny how internal scars never healed. They were the souvenirs of the past.”

“without my wounds, who was i? my scars were my face, my past was my life.”

“Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.”

“Interesting people always have a past.”

“Unless you can change the past, you’re wasting the present on this guilt”

“I hate how my past actions keep messing up my future options, Seth muttered.
Then you've started down the road to wisdom, Grandpa replied.”

“But life isn’t about learning to forgive those who have hurt you or forgetting your past. It’s about learning to forgive yourself for being human and making mistakes.”

“Never be a prisoner of your past. Become the architect of you future. You will never be the same.”

“Because I don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in the present".”

“You left me."
Not realizing until I've said my final good-bye and closed the door behind me, that he's not referring to the past.
He's prophesying our future.”

“In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.”

“Our past may shape us, but it doesn't define us.”

“The warlock's gaze, on the flames, was remote and distant, as if he were looking back into the past. Simon couldn't help but remember what Magnus had said to him once, about living forever:
Someday you and I will be the only two left.”

“The past reflects eternally between two mirrors -the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn't do or say.”

“People never leave, we are always here in our past and future lives.”