Quotes About Past

Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws ... I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn't a character flaw.

There is somehow something extraordinarily alluring about the scent of old paper, and the feel of brittle pages.  It's a gateway opening onto the past; it's a hand stretching out from the long-ago to clasp yours.

In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.

Having studied art history, as opposed to political history, I tend to incorporate found objects into my books. Just as Pablo Picasso glued a fragment of furniture onto the canvas of Still Life with Chair Caning, I like to use whatever's lying around to paint pictures of the past--traditional pigment like archival documents but also the added texture of whatever bits and bobs I learn from looking out bus windows or chatting up people I bump into on the road.

You can't miss what you don't remember ever having.

In the past - even a long while after she left me - I thought of Anny. Now I think of no one any more. I don't even bother looking for words. It flows in me, more or less quickly. I fix nothing, I let it go. Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up: I forget them almost immediately.

And where was that day? Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father's. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then, general forgiveness.

But I was afraid I'd have to give up on an ideal explanation of her past life. Oh well, there didn't have to be one necessarily.

His early book, not much noticed when it was published, was now on many reading lists, and the younger generation of historians accepted it as a model of the new sort of history, "history that interests us"—personal, engagée—and looks at the past with an intense need for contemporary relevance.

Sometimes I like to think I live with ghosts. Not from my past, but wispy bits of ideas and books that hang in the air like silk puppets. Sometimes I think I see my own ideas, floating around too, but they usually don't last that long. They're more like mayflies; they're born, big and gleaming, and then they fly around, buzzing like crazy before they fall to the floor, dead, about twenty four hours later.

Cuando empleamos nuestras horas agradablemente, transcurren más de prisa; pero cuando éstas son tristes se deslizan con mayor lentitud [...]; por otro lado, casi no tenemos noción del pasado cuando éste es aburrido y en cambio lo tenemos presente cuando es entretenido.

about finding evidence of the past) And when you get that confirmation, it would instantly become the past itself. So in effect, you would be using the past, which does not exist, to confirm something else from the past. And if you repeat the process a thousand times, with a thousand different pieces of evidence, together they would still be nothing but impressions of the past supporting other impressions of the past.

Focusing on the past when the present offers sufficient paths to success is loserthink. It is better to focus on your own systems for success, and when you succeed, watch how winning fixes most problems.

The Rusty Ruins were the remains of an old city, a hulking reminder of back when there'd been way too many people, and everyone was incredibly stupid. And ugly.

as dores não seriam tão grandes entre os homens se eles -Deus sabe por que os fez assim-, com tanto ardor de imaginação, não se empenhassem em revocar os passados dissabores em vez de aturar um presente suportável.

It was as if my soul were thinking separately from the body: she looked upon the body as a foreign substance, as we look upon a garment. She pictured with extreme vivacity events and times long past, and felt, by means of this, events that were to follow. Those times are all gone by; what follows likewise will go by; the body, too, will fall to pieces like a vesture; but I, the well-known I, I am.

Minden, minden elmúlt! Semmi jele annak a volt világnak, egyetlen szívdobbanás sem maradt akkori érzéseimb?l. Mintha kísértet volnék, amely visszatér kiégett, romos kastélyába, dús fejedelem korában maga építette, tündökl?n fölékesített palotájába, amelyet haldoklásában is reménnyel telve hagyott szeretett fiára.

If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.

Self pity is the glue that binds you to your past...

The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.

We might realize that the present moment may be one of an eternal or sempiternal series of moments, all of which will resemble it because, in some ways, they are the present, and won't in other ways, because the present will be the past by that time.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.

Publicity is in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future... According to publicity, to be sophisticated is to live beyond conflict.

If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.