Best 10290 quotes in «past quotes» category

From the stage Ben catches my eye. "This is for them, Taylor," he calls out as they begin to play. It's a song by the Waterboys and, like each time I hear the music played by the boy in the tree in my dreams, I experience a bittersweet sense of nostalgia I have no right to own. When it's time for Ben to play his solo–his eyes closed, his mind anywhere but here, his fingers so taut and precise that it almost looks painful–my eyes well with tears. Because you know from the look on Ben's face that he's somewhere you want to be. Somewhere the five would be each time they were together.

Fuck the past. This was the present.

Furthermore, a society with no sense of the past, with no sense of the human role as significant not merely in experiencing history but in creating it can have no sense of destiny. And what kind of society is it that has no sense of destiny and no sense of self? That has no need or will to measure itself by the record of human achievement and the range of human endowment? And here we may pause to ask what our society measures itself by. Is it only by the ability to gratify immediate appetites, capacity for consumption, and the GNP?

Future will forgive us but are you ready to forgive your past?

Funny how you lose sight of some things and memory others.

Future can alter your past too, perhaps no wise man has told this before.

Gdy w domu sąsiadów pokazują wam z nabożeństwem sygnet prapradziadka, wolno pomyśleć, że teraźniejszość tej rodziny musi być pod zdechłym Azorem, skoro przeszłość tak jej imponuje.

Getting stuck in the past and whining about who had hurt us hampers our personal growth and submerges us in the sea of self-compassion.

Ghosts don’t stay buried when they’re laced in gold.

Ghosts are everywhere, not just the ghost of Momma in the woods, but ghosts of us too, what we used to be like in those long summers.

Ghosts will forever put in appearances, as they should. Our illusions have muscle and meaning. The past returns at midnight, in the heart of our dreams, and the rains and the willows forever remind us of the sacrifices we’ve offered and those we have yet to make.

God's already let go of your past. He doesn't remember it. He doesn't count it against you. Now it's time for you to let go too.

Going away won't change anything if you're running from yourself.

Gone are the days when success depends on how you use your muscle tissues. In this 21st century, your brain cells must work more than your muscle tissues!

Good...if you've done things you aren't proud of. It means you have a conscience.

Good parents use the mistakes they did in the past when they were young to advice the children God gave to them to prevent them from repeating those mistakes again. However, bad parents always want to be seen as right and appear "angelic and saintly" as if they never had horrible youth days.

Great beauty and youth capture our attention, excite a deep pleasure; however, why shouldn't our souls gaze at a countenance over which the years have passed? Isn't there a story there, one unknown, full of pain or beauty, which pours its reflection into the features, a story we can read with some compassion or at least get a slight hint of its meaning? The young point toward the future; the old tell of a past.

Growing up, I always had a soldier mentality. As a kid I wanted to be a soldier, a fighter pilot, a covert agent, professions that require a great deal of bravery and risk and putting oneself in grave danger in order to complete the mission. Even though I did not become all those things, and unless my predisposition, in its youngest years, already had me leaning towards them, the interest that was there still shaped my philosophies. To this day I honor risk and sacrifice for the good of others - my views on life and love are heavily influenced by this.

Happiness is a state of mind, so our miseries and joy come from living in any of the three dimensions of time—past, present and future. Hence, if we wish to live happily, we must learn to remove sufferings not only from the present, but also from the past and future.

Grow past your past and march past the flag of the past!

Have compassion for your past. By showing love to the present. Your past was just the portal to now.

Happiness is neither in the past, nor in the future. It is here right now, in the present.

Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now. For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time. Well, I have lived most of my life; I can be robbed of only a few more years. But it seems too bad - this universal craving to escape what could be a rich, productive, happy world. We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask. Why in the world can't we have it? ("I'm Scared")

Having researched human health, I think that doctors were far smarter fifty years ago than today.

He’d trade anything to be back there in the past, rather than to deal with what was going on in the present.

He cried for the future, and he cried because of the past.

He gets away with it because he's strong.' 'This is the story of mankind.' 'I thought you were going to be a priest at one point.' 'Yes. But then I read the newspaper.

He could not afford to indulge misery, to live in the past and stumble through life facing backwards.

He had always despised people who thought about the past. To live was to leave behind; to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything.

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.

He looked at the silver pocketknife in his hand. An idea came to him – possibly the stupidest, craziest idea he’d had since he thought, Hey, I’ll get Percy to swim in the River Styx! He’ll love me for that!

He ought to let the past keep its glow and not try to mix it with what he had in the present.

He questioned the present, the past, and he realized that life had a way of preparing you for nothing at all.

Here, in this house the ghosts of our past are real

He remembers how someone – he forgets who – once said in a sarcastic tone, “Isn’t she just Little Miss Sweetness and Light?” – and it was a statement that put him off proposing. It made him seriously reassess his options. He didn’t want to be with someone others saw as overly-moral because he has flaws, he has weaknesses. How would his mistakes compare to her virtuousness? She used to dislike the competitiveness at work, the way she claimed she could never really make friends with anyone because everything was always so fake and cut-throat and he used to berate her for it, used to tell her to accept it, to realise the truth about life and relationships – but she wouldn’t take it. She was always thinking too hard about everything, always questioning her motives. Surely, if he’d married her, she’d have started questioning his.

Her heart is smashed glass. Peer into her jagged edges to see what refracts from the light of her past. Kaleidoscopic beauty.

Her today's silence is the unheard shouts from past that you never listened.

He was beautiful and still is, we just couldn’t flow within the same constellation.

He was a stranger here. The people who might remember him would certainly not welcome him. His old gang had cast him out, along with all of the former friends and parents. The suburban landscape of hypocrisy, so hated in his youth, beheld again and with it, old feelings that motivated him through life more than he would ever admit. Every turning point in life, already decided by all the events here

He uses our past to positively affect our present and secure our future.

He was acutely aware then that he was closer to his future than he was with the memories of his past.

He went to hell and back, to shut the door of his past, he would not let that door be opened again by others.

His love was a poison: soft and loveable, hideous yet touchable.

hide your feelings, hide you thoughts, hide your self from the world but dont hide you from you cause only you know where you stand & the world's knows nothing

Historians conquer the past, not the future. (Les historiens conquièrent - Le passé, non l'avenir)

History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present – the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject. History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction between the historian and the past. As such, history can be seen as a process of evaluation whereby the past is always coloured by the intellectual fashions and philosophical concerns of the present. This shifting perspective on the past is matched by the fluid status of the past itself.

History is not so much memory as collective evidence. It is what has happened, what is thought to have happened, what some claim to have happened. The collective past is fact and fabrication--much like our private pasts. There is no received truth, just a tenuous thread of events amid a swirl of dispute and conflicting interpretation. But... the past is real. This is simplistic, but also, for me, awe-inspiring. I am silenced when I think about it: the great ballast of human existence.

...history is, as R.G. Collingwood suggested, a re-enactment of the past in the mind of the historian...

History would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.

History was not simply a catalogue of the dead and buried and benighted, but rather a vast new world to be pioneered; ...if you approached the past generously, so to speak—its people as humans, not facts, as modern in their time as we were in ours, who thought and felt as we do, the dead would live again, our equals, not our old-fashioned, hopelessly unenlightened, and backward inferiors. Humanity, to be fully known, had to be seen as changeless as well as ever changing.