Best 10290 quotes in «past quotes» category

The sky was of the deepest blue, with a few white, fleecy clouds drifting lazily across it, and the air was filled with the low drone of insects or with a sudden sharper note as bee or bluefly shot past with its quivering, long-drawn hum, like an insect tuning-fork.

The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age. ... Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.

The slippers of the mortal Earth, now touched the chest of the Moon. Oh, it is shameful that the misery of hunger is still continuing as it was in the past.

The social revolution...cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all superstitions concerning the past.

The smell of moist earth and lilacs hung in the air like wisps of the past and hints of the future.

The soul awakes ... between two dim eternities - the eternal past, the eternal future.

The Soul which is approaching its' liberation, as it looks back over past lives... down the vistas of the centuries along which it has slowly been climbing,... is able to see there the way in which the bonds were made, the causes which set it in motion. It is able to see how many of those causes have worked themselves out and... how many... are still working themselves out.

The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.

The spiritual journey, the path of recovery and personal growth, is a detoxification process in which we bring up and out the negative beliefs we have carried with us from the past and that now poison the present.

The stagnation of the Japanese economy in the past 20 years is eloquent testimony to the fact that government usually gets it wrong. Sometimes it makes the wrong decision because it fails to anticipate the market (as Japan did when it downplayed laptop computers and stressed mainframes).

The statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past.

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.

The strange thing about the apocalypse is that it's uneven. For some people, it goes one way and for others another way, so that there's always this shifting relation to the narrative of the disaster. Sometimes apocalypses are just structural fictions, and sometimes they're real. Sometimes a narrative requires an end - the fact that the beginning was always leading somewhere becomes clear at the end. There's an idea that we're always in the middle, but we posit this apocalyptic end in order to also be able to project into the past or the beginning. I think that's true and false.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

The stories from Iran's present and past are reminders that freedom, democracy and human rights, or fundamentalism, fascism and terrorism are not geographically and culturally determined, but universal.

The strings to our past are burned because we need a new beginning.

The successful publishing house is the one that can guess ahead, not the one that imitates the past.

The study of history empowers nations and individuals with an ability to avoid errors of the past and lay foundations for victories in the future.

The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. . . No man is so wise but that he may learn some wisdom from his past errors, either of thought or action, and no society has made such advances as to be capable of no improvement from the retrospect of its past folly and credulity.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical.

The subject-matter of Archaeology is threefold-the Oral, the Written and the Monumental.

The success that comes from my books is not something I feel very comfortable with. Past a certain point you have to accept the idea that the success is a lot to do with the timing and luck and that divorces you from it massively. There are aspects of it that I haven't got used to at all. But I've enjoyed some parts of it massively. It relates to the same reason I did a lot of backpacking — partly for the experience — it's something to tell my grandkids. It's a weird chain of events to have in your life.

The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light.

The Super Bowl is a game. Life is for real. What I went through helped me get to where I am today. I won't forget. I can't forget. Because a man who forgets his past sometimes loses his soul and forgets where to go in the future.

The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. "I think she listens," she said, too softly to be heard.

The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity and many deeds of the past, in order to strengthen his character thereby.

The Supreme Court of the United States of America will never under any circumstances allow anyone to be stripped of their citizenship because they burned the American flag. And if you don't believe that, you haven't been reading constitutional law for the past seventy years.

The sweetest cordial we receive at last, Is conscience of our virtuous actions past.

The symbolic display seen by the abductees is identical to the type of initiation ritual or astral voyage that is imbedded in the [occult] traditions of every culture...the structure of abduction stories is identical to that of occult initiation rituals...the UFO beings of today belong to the same class of manifestation as the [occult] entities that were described in centuries past.

The supposition that the future resembles the past, is not founded on arguments of any kind, but is derived entirely from habit.

The surface of the earth is not simply a stage on which the thousands of present and past inhabitants played their parts in turn. There are much more intimate relations between the earth and the living organisms which populated it, and it may even be demonstrated that the earth was developed because of them.

The swiftness of time is infinite, as is still more evident when we look back on the past.

The task is to keep the lost opportunities of the past alive.

The talk of pale, burning-eyed students, anarchists and utopians all, over tea and cigarettes in a locked room long past midnight, is next morning translated, with the literalness of utter innocence, into the throwing of the bomb, the shouting of the proud slogan, the dragging away of the young dreamer-doer, still smiling, to the dungeon and the firing squad.

The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.

[The taxidermist is] a historian, dealing with an animal's past; the zookeeper is a politician, dealing with an animal's present; and everyone else is a citizen who must decide on that animal's future (...) The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.

The teaching on karma starts with the principle that people experience happiness and sorrow based on a combination of their past and present intentions. If we act with unskillful intentions either for ourselves or for others, we’re going to suffer. If we act with skillful intentions, we’ll experience happiness. So if we want to be happy, we have to train our intentions to always be skillful.

The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.

the tentacles of today reach out like an octopus to swallow yesterday.

The tendencies are considerably weaker in the natural sciences, which, for the past several centuries, have survived and flourished through such constant challenge, and therefore, at best, seek to encourage it. Serving the status quo in political and socioeconomic realms is a different matter.

The testimony of every scientist is that the frontiers that are opening out ahead of us now are far wider and more spectacular than any frontier of America in the past. Our horizons are not closed. We are going to write a greater development in America than has ever been conceived.

The terrorists who have succeeded in carrying out spectacular attacks against Western targets in the past have been college-educated, technically proficient men who are capable of manufacturing and deploying chemical, radiological, and biological weapons. Al Qaeda attracts the kind of highly educated men who one day might be able to pull off such an attack.

The thing about acting is that it's fairly random. At the end of the day you take what drifts past you or what's given to you.

The theme of the dance was "Great Romances," or some such nonsense. There were projections of supposedly great couples from the past on the walls of the gym. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Hermione and Ron, Bonnie and Clyde, etc.

The things that unite us-America's past of which we are so proud, our hopes and aspirations for the future of the world and this much loved country-these things far outweigh what little divides us.

The things I felt... about certain painters of the past that... inspired me, like Cezanne and Manet... that complete losing of oneself in the work to such an extent that the work itself... felt as if a living organism was posited there on the canvas, on this surface... That's truly... the act of creation.

The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of children at play in the neighborhood, Ginger Rogers on the black-and-white screen.

The Things that never can come back, are several- Childhood-some forms of Hope-the Dead- Though Joys-like Men-may sometimes make a Journey- And still abide-.