Quotes About Past

la opción benedictina no invita a mirar el pasado sino afrontar el futuro con la combativa, discreta y razonable esperanza que mantuvo la fe de Charles Péguy, Emmanuel Mounier o Jacques Maritain.

Now is next to nothing compared to where I've been.

I was rich in those days, for a week I had everything. I wish I'd known you then.

Christianity was oriented to the future, while the other major religions asserted the superiority of the past. At least in principle, if not always in fact, Christian doctrines could always be modified in the name of progress as demonstrated by reason.

El retorno del axolote representa la terquedad por volver a un progreso castrado por el atraso, a un pasado donde supuestamente el pueblo vive feliz estancado en la metamorfosis frustrada. Se trata de la restauración del nacionalismo revolucionario priista, ese viejo enemigo de la democracia.

La amenaza que significaba López Obrador era clara: quería dar un salto hacia atrás, para llegar a los bellos tiempos de un pasado imaginario. Evidentemente, un retorno al México de los años sesenta y setenta era algo imposible, pero del intento de restauración podía surgir un extraño esperpento, un adefesio político. Eso es exactamente lo que sucedió.

Part of the process of getting out, of uprooting, is to shed origins. In Rome, as elsewhere in my family, the past was less a source of fascination than a thing to be overcome.

His past, again like Dali's, had to be mythologised. For, let's face it, his lower-middle-class upbringing was not exactly Angela's Ashes

The future is to be conquered, the present ridiculed, and the past outdone." Voltaire Almighty

Nostalgia is often a mask for rage. The intensity with which we yearn for a lost world is frequently proportionate to the discomfort we feel in our own.

If you want to know why this life is like it is, you should know that it is because of your last life. If you want to know what your future life will be, you should look at the way you are living in this life.

Whoever you are! motion and reflection are especially for you, The divine ship sails the divine sea for you. Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid or liquid, You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky, For none more than you are the present and the past, For none more than you is immortality. —WALT WHITMAN, "A SONG OF THE ROLLING EARTH

The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An analogy, of course, is found in any psychoanalytic treatment: the patient is rigidly determined by past experiences and previously developed patterns to the extent that he is unaware of these experiences and patterns.

what an individual seeks to become determines what he remembers of his has been. In this sense the future determines the past.

When Christophe at last made up his mind to go to bed, chilled in body and soul, he heard the window below him shut. And, as he lay, he thought sadly that it is cruel for the poor to dwell on the past, for they have no right to have a past, like the rich: they have no home, no corner of the earth wherein to house their memories: their joys, their sorrows, all their days, are scattered in the wind.

I saw this moment as attached by threads to eternity and woven between all the other braided moments of my past and my future.

National-ism seeks legitimacy from the past and history therefore becomes a sensitive subject

In contemporary times we not only reconstruct the past but we also use it to give legitimacy to the way in which we order our own society.

A society has many pasts from which it chooses those that go into the creation of its history. The choice is made by those in authority—the authority being of various kinds—although occasionally the voice of others may be heard.

I have over the years of my research been struck by the frequency with which the present makes use of the past either in a detrimental manner where it becomes a part of various political ploys, or alternatively in a positive manner to claim an enviable legitimacy and inheritance.

The alienation implicit in modernization is sought to be assuaged by the creation of a past and of ideologies that legitimize the present.

If the past is to be called upon to legitimize the present, as it so frequently is, then the veracity of such a past has to be continuously vetted.

I specialize in famous stout ladies, past and present. I'm best known for my Sophie Tucker. You look almost old enough to remember the late great Sophie, God rest her soul.

Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface.