Past Quotes - Page 31

When you dive into your past, remember to go back up quickly.

The reason for the past is only revealed in the future.

Let's be grateful to all those who came in before us. Grateful to all those men and women, young and old alike, who paved the path forward for us, brick by brick. To those men and women who marched across the bridge in Selma on that great day, those men and women who rallied behind the Gandhis and the Mandelas every single time they were needed, to those men and women who stood up for voting rights and civil rights and gay rights and equality and justice and a free world, those men and women who invented the future by inventing things that fundamentally changed the world from the electricity to vaccinations, from airplanes to birth control pills, from the printing press to the internet.

Sharad Vivek Sagar

Our past is what molds us into the person we are today. It does not define us.

Imania Margria

Sometimes to change a situation you are in requires you to take a giant leap. But, you won't be able to fly unless you are willing to transform.

Suzy Kassem

Let your past propel you forward, not hold you back.

Toni Sorenson

You are a special and unique person, who has never lived before and who will never live in the future

Sunday Adelaja

According to the Bible, every man has a past, present, and future

Sunday Adelaja

We cannot change anything in our past

Sunday Adelaja

What has happened in the past is gone

Sunday Adelaja

Files of the past can be changed through shock, encouragement or pain

Sunday Adelaja

If I could remove one thing from the world and replace it with something else, I would erase politics and put art in its place. That way, art teachers would rule the world. And since art is the most supreme form of love, beautiful colors and imagery would weave bridges for peace wherever there are walls. Artists, who are naturally heart-driven, would decorate the world with their love, and in that love — poverty, hunger, lines of division, and wars would vanish from the earth forever. Children of the earth would then be free to play, imagine, create, build and grow without bloodshed, terror and fear.

Suzy Kassem

We can’t fear the future with a present mindset. We must ask ourselves questions we do not know the answers to, we should disrupt ourselves to grow.

Natasha Tsakos

The skeletons of the past must not hold back the dream of a new life, even though fear and regret, guilt and remorse may unsettle us during the effort to give our future a new home. (“Into a new life”)

Erik Pevernagie

The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

G.K. Chesterton

The past haunts the present in more ways than we think. It certainly scares the living daylights out of ME"~ Old Wrinkly

Cressida Cowell

Life is a movement, a constant movement in relationship; and thought, trying to capture that movement in terms of the past, as memory, is afraid of life.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Oh, Myr," he chokes out. "I hate having to ask this of you..."He glances towards the car again, and I crouch down in the shadows, hoping it's too dark for him to see whether the window is open or closed. The woman pats his arm, cradling her hand against his elbow."You know I'd do anything for you and Hil," she says. I like her voice. It's throaty and rich."You'd do anything?" my father repeats numbly. "Even now? After -?""Even now," the woman says firmly.

Margaret Peterson Haddix

Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists, continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time.

Alice MIller

Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

C.S. Lewis

We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.

Daphne du Maurier

Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and runing its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do-the only thing-is run.

Lauren Oliver

Humans recognize the duality, autonomy, and latitude range of the mind and the body, and all humans comprehend their impending mortality. Unlike other animals, humankind knows despair brought about by understanding the inevitability of death of all living creatures. The radius of human thought touching upon the longitude of our transient existence causes infinite pain. Seeking to ameliorate existential anguish incites us to ponder spiritual matters, and this sphere of mental activity spurs us to contemplate the perimeter of unknown frontiers. Our ability to understand the compass of life and death allows us to view the circumference of the world as consisting of a past, a present, and a future in relation to our own lives. How a person views the range of their earthly life and how a person rationalizes their march towards a deathly outback creates a system of beliefs that separate people into classes, and the variations amongst class members’ belief systems supplements who we think we are.

Kilroy J. Oldster

This is a day of celebration!Today, we are divorcing the pastand marrying the present.Dance,and you will find Godin every room.Today, we are divorcing resentmentand marrying forgiveness.Sing,and God will find you in every tune.Today, we are divorcing indifferenceand marrying love.Drink, and play that tambourine against your thighs.We have so much celebrating to do!

Kamand Kojouri

Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present. I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again.

Lisa Bu

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

Ray Bradbury

Sorgan tried his very best not to think about how long it must have taken for a stream that small to eat its way down through solid rock to form its current bed. Sorgan knew exactly what the word “hundred” meant, but when numbers wandered off toward “thousand”—or even “million”—and the people who used those terms were talking about years, Sorgan’s mind shied back in horror.

David Eddings

The future is just a projection of the past.

Vivake Pathak

The key to our scientific future,....is hidden in our past

Dan Brown

We should kill our pasts with each passing day. Blot them out, so that they will not hurt. Each present day could thus be endured more easily, it would not be measured against what no longer exists. As things are, spectres mix with our lives so that there is neither pure memory nor pure life. They clash and try to strangle each other, continually

Meša Selimović

He no longer loves the person whom he loved ten years ago. I quite believe it. She is no longer the same, nor is he. He was young, and she also; she is quite different. He would perhaps love her yet, if she were what she was then.

Blaise Pascal

Time goes, you say? Ah no!Alas, Time stays, we go;Or else, were this not so, What need to chain the hours,For Youth were always ours?Time goes, you say?-ah no!Ours is the eyes' deceitOf men whose flying feetLead through some landscape low; We pass, and think we seeThe earth's fixed surface flee:-Alas, Time stays,-we go!Once in the days of old,Your locks were curling gold,And mine had shamed the crow. Now, in the self-same stage,We've reached the silver age;Time goes, you say?-ah no!Once, when my voice was strong,I filled the woods with songTo praise your 'rose' and 'snow'; My bird, that sang, is dead;Where are your roses fled?Alas, Time stays,-we go!See, in what traversed ways,What backward Fate delaysThe hopes we used to know; Where are our old desires?-Ah, where those vanished fires?Time goes, you say?-ah no!How far, how far, O Sweet,The past behind our feetLies in the even-glow! Now, on the forward way,Let us fold hands, and pray;Alas, Time stays,-we go!

Henry Austin Dobson

David Eddings

The future is just a projection of the past.

Vivake Pathak

The key to our scientific future,....is hidden in our past

Dan Brown

Meša Selimović

Blaise Pascal

Henry Austin Dobson

At last, the clock settled in the right place.

R.J. Lawrence

The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

Iris Murdoch

The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future.Cut loose the past; it is dead weight.Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.

Stephen Baxter

The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.

P.D. James

Love is circumstantial we can love anyone if need be and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past.

Andrew Solomon

It’s quite certain there are places to which the whole past is as though attached, on which are traced in secret letters for people who are centuries removed from us their thoughts, their will…

Vladimir Odoyevsky

The pathway traced with blood and tears,and dust of all our father's dead,Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red,Fade to the mist of nameless years.(“The Testimony of the Suns”)

George Sterling

...the passage of time, which transformed the volatile present into that finished, unalterable painting called the past, a canvas man always executed blindly, with erratic brushstrokes that only made sense when one stepped far enough away from it to be able to admire it as a whole. -pg. 19

Félix J. Palma

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.

Jamaica Kincaid

The past embraces the futureThe future embraces the pastThey are both intertwinedLinked in all eternity

Karen Hackel

But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?

Alan Lightman

We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.

Criss Jami

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced – and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.

Carol Shields

Look back on Time, with kindly eyes -He doubtless did his best -How softly sinks that trembling sunIn Human Nature's West -

Emily Dickinson

If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being--ever mindful of its personal style.

Tom Robbins

The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

Anton Chekhov

Information about time cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs must be unscrewed and whose drawers must be removed before, in an altered state, it can be upended into the entryway of our minds, then the future is a king-size waterbed that hardly stands a chance, especially if it needs to be brought up in an elevator.Those billions who persist in perceiving time as the pursuit of the future are continually buying waterbeds that will never make it beyond the front porch or the lobby. And if man's mission is to reside in the fullness of the present, then he's got no space for the waterbed, anyhow, not even if he could lower it through a skylight.

Tom Robbins

There is only now. And look! How rich we are in it.

Vanna Bonta

In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection.

Andrei Tarkovsky

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Well we've left behind the 200X's, and we move onto the 20XX's. Maybe that will finally make us feel like we're living in the future, rather than a media controlled slave state where an iPhone is worth substantially more than a human life. Happy new year.

Yahtzee Croshaw

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

Jeanette Winterson

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Past Quotes - Page 31

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