“Many thoughts often devour us. We all have a more or less beautiful past and we can all go haywire, but considering lived experiences as a learning an opportunity… will help us to love the present and the future of life.”

“We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that’s of no use to the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It’s always new.”

“If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life.”

“But we can't escape into the future like we can escape into the past. So those of us who are not certain of things, and there are an awful lot of us, often rush back to the past. And each one has a particular past he prefers to the present. Sometimes I feel that any past is preferable to the present.”

“Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ. Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.”

“We cannot inherit a fixed, unmoving view of life and of art from the past generation. The expression of art is in any period different, as are our experiences. A new experience creates a new form. We like to learn all we need from earlier generations, but we have to find out for ourselves what we need; nobody else can do that for us. It is not our business to receive and work on what the earlier generation might want us to work on. On the other hand, it is its business to help us where we want its help.”

“We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.”

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”

“Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present. Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have made.”

“God is in the résumé-building business. He is always using past experiences to prepare us for future opportunities.”