Best 201 quotes in «the past quotes» category

To redeem the past and to transform every 'It was' into an 'I wanted it thus!' – that alone do I call redemption!

To strengthen the connection between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind is to gain access to a map and compass to help you move towards your dream. To gain access to the subconscious mind is to gain the ability to see and create the future, the ability to shift the present, and the ability to alter your own perceptions of the past.

Unless we do something about the past, she thought, then it will weigh us down to such an extent that we simply cannot move. Is that what I want?

until it is taken out of your mind, it is never lost and it is never gone

Using unbreakable cups robs us of yet another incentive to be mindful.

We cannot change the past, she thought. How we long to sometimes, trying to work out how horror might have been averted by a fluke of fortune, a kind intercession, wisdom not yet granted.

We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again,

We have to outgrow history. History is what keeps all the old wounds and grievances alive.

We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.

We looked into one another's eyes, and I think we both knew in that instant that the past was behind us. We could never be to each other what we had been once.

We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.

Were they waltzing, at that fleeting moment which the camera seized and tossed on into the future? Her feet seem scarcely to touch the dance floor.

We show our animal nature by not living for the future, and our human nature by not living in the present.

what does it mean to be descendant of something monstrous? to still love the monster?

What he had remembered was to tuck among his changes of clothes one of Regan's framed photographs of the four of them from a few summers back, at Lake Winnipesaukee. He set it up on the nightstand, as if he might swim down into the past, where nothing could go wrong.

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seem like artifacts from a long-lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass.

When I was with him suddenly I wasn’t this broken person anymore. I was just me. I was whole again. I was just a person – like everyone else.

When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction.

When the past comes knocking, don't answer. It has nothing new to tell you.

When we awake most morning we think back to the past, and situations that we had. Were they handled correctly? What could have been done different? The past is gone. In reflection, we should be looking forward to the promise of a new day, and brand new situations, releasing our minds of the past, and the questions that weigh on us.

When we think carefully about the past, we get to know and understand not just what happened in the past but what really went into things that happened in the past.

When you live in the present, the past is forgotten & the future takes care of itself.

when you shoot for the stars, you can't ever look back.

Where exactly does it come from, I’d like to know, this ineradicable attitude of superiority toward the past? This stubbornly dumb, can’t-kill-it-with-an-ax conviction that we, the now, critically and categorically know better than they, the past. Is it from the mere fact that their future is known to us, that we know what happens? (Nothing good.) It’s much the way we treat small children— pedantic and permissive at the same time. And we always think of the people of the past — just as we do of children — as being naïve in everything from their clothes and hairstyles to their thoughts and feelings.

Whether beautiful or terrible, the past is always a ruin.

Why is it that happiness remembered feels like despair?

Why you have such bourgeois preoccupation with all personal history?' 'Because it's important... it defines... it helps us understand... because we can learn... Oh, I don't know.

With you in my life I felt like I could conquer anything. It was as if I was on top of the world and even the stars themselves were just within my grasp. But without you …. even getting through the day is hard.

You’re everything to me. But at best, I’m just a memory to you.

Your memory feels like home to me. So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.

You seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all.

Unngh,' the Minotaur says. What he means is that every past is littered and scarred. What he means is that the present moment is the only moment that pulses, that breathes. What he means is that he himself is capable of great tenderness but has also done great harm. The Minotaur knows that sometimes mercy requires expedience. Haste. Sometimes it can't be about how much a thing hurts.

VIEW FROM A HILL I am not yet quite over it. I am lying down on top of it. Surveying behind me a wasteland Of dried-up promise. While the lights below twinkle With dull mocking uncertainty. There isn't much left to look forward to, And the looking forward of the past has been belied.

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past.

We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours forever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgody. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen. But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow.

We can't leave the past in the past because, the past is who we are. It's like saying I wish I could forget English. So, there is no leaving the past in the past. It doesn't mean the past has to define and dominate everything in the future. The fact that I had a temper in my teens doesn't mean I have to be an angry person for the rest of my life. It just means that I had allot to be angry about but, didn't have the language and the understanding to know what it was and how big it was. I thought my anger was disproportionate to the environment which is what is called having a bad temper but, it just means that I underestimated the environment and my anger was telling me how wide and deep child abuse is in society but, I didn't understand that consciously so I thought my anger was disproportionate to the environment but, it wasn't. There is almost no amount of anger that's proportionate to the degree of child abuse in the world. The fantasy that you can not be somebody that lived through what you lived through is damaging to yourself and to your capacity to relate to others. People who care about you, people who are going to grow to love you need to know who you are and that you were shaped by what you've experienced for better and for worse. There is a great deal of challenge in talking about these issues. Lots of people in this world have been hurt as children. Most people have been hurt in this world as children and when you talk honestly and openly it's very difficult for people. This is why it continues and continues.If you can get to the truth of what happened if you can understand why people made the decisions they've made even if you dont agree with the reason for those decisions knowing the reasons for those decisions is enormously important in my opinion. The more we know the truth of history the more confidently we can face the future without self blame.

WE COMMENTED TO Corrie about the practicalness of the things she recalled, how her memories seemed to throw a spotlight on problems and decisions we faced here and now. "But," she said, "this is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.

Would she suddenly grow into maturity and discard me as a relic from a failed past, the way I'd hoped to do to her when my year of sleep was over?

You can miss places. You can miss people. Just know that what you’re really missing is the way things were. And even if you could go there again…. see them again…. you can’t go back. They’re not the same. You’re not the same. The loss of them changed you.

...you can love some all you want, but you can't go into their past and become a part of their formative years.

You can't hold on to the past and expect to grow as a human being.

You NEED to look back to remember the awesome memories, to remember the positive lessons you have learned, to help someone else learn from what you have lived and to see how far you have come.

A kiss…. ….. is just a kiss…. Until it’s all you reminisce. (Then the memory becomes your most treasured possession.)

A long time ago someone told me that a story will tell itself, when it's ready.

A great mystery lies in the repetition and continuity of the renewal of that which is past. Culture perpetuates itself in memory and the big job is the reawakening of memory.

Diamonds are held under tons and tons of pressure, extremely high temperatures of fire and shuffled under shifting of tectonic plates, for a long, long time! Yet when they come out from there and are put on display for their beauty; does anybody stop to evaluate the diamond based upon all the shit it's been through and say "Remember that disgusting hole it used to be in? I bet it was hell in there!" No, people don't remember where a diamond has come from; they just see the beauty of it now. But it wouldn't have become so beautiful, you know, if not for all of that! So why should we look at other people, or at ourselves and evaluate them/ourselves based upon their/our pasts? Shouldn't we forget that? And only see the beauty that is in front of our eyes? Whatever it was, it made you beautiful! And that is what matters!

Don't sacrifice the present and attempt to achieve the impossible- to completely correct the past... It's gone! Learn from it and move on...

Almost all sadness comes from thinking about the past, and all worry from thinking about the future — present-mindedness is your only safe haven.

Already my childhood seemed far away—a remote age, faded and bittersweet, like dried flowers. Did I regret its loss, did I want it back? I didn't think so.

Always thinking is as tragic as never thinking.