Quotes About Past

The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong ? To those who can app|y it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialtsts?

A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history.

The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.

geçmiÅŸ hiçbir zaman olduÄŸu yerde durup yeniden keÅŸfedilmeyi, ayn?yla, olduÄŸu gibi tan?nmay? beklemez. tarih her zaman belli bir ÅŸimdi'yle onun geçmiÅŸi aras?ndaki iliÅŸkiyi kurar. demek ki ÅŸimdi'den korkmak eskiyi bulandirmaya yol aç?yor. geçmiÅŸ içinde yaÅŸanacak bir ÅŸey deÄŸildir.

The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.

bir kitap yazmak isterim bazen yaln?z zamanla ilgili bir kitap zaman?n nas?l da olmay???, gelecek ve geçmiÅŸin nas?l da sürekli bir ÅŸu an oluÅŸuyla ilgili. düÅŸünürüm ki herkes - yaÅŸayan yaÅŸam?? ve yaÅŸayacak olan herkes- canl?d?r ÅŸimdi. bu meseleyi didik didik etmek isterim tüfeÄŸini boÅŸaltan bir asker gibi.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

I will talk of things heavenly, or things earthly; things moral, or things evangelical; things sacred, or things profane; things past, or things to come; things foreign, or things at home; things more essential, or things circumstantial.

This is why the past seems perfect, a time of proportion and order, because it is immersed in speech. For animals, memory might reside as a sensation, a resonance in the nerves, or in the meat of the spine. But for humans, the past cannot be described except in words. It is nowhere else.

No Memory happens in the past. To say this in so many words is, no doubt, to state the obvious - our memories happen now, in the madeleine- and tisane-tinctured present - but it strikes me as peculiar, still, that my recollections have so little to do with historical time.

One of history's most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or disgraceful.

These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.

Then again, maybe nostalgia was an understandable response to a world that appeared to be going all to hell, as long as everyone remembered that the past was a nice place to visit but nobody should want to settle in it. One

In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory

Badness lingered, and if blood penetrated deep enough into wood, the stain became near permanent. The past gave substance to the present, and all old places were storehouses of memory: the more ancient the site, the greater the accumulation, and bygone atrocities called to new.

There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hair's breadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end.

he had more days behind him than ahead.

I felt about the city as I felt about the house in Scarborough : it was a place where the past was alive in the present, where a man could find a place for himself as long as he understood the fact that he was a link in the chain, for a man cut off from his past was a man adrift in the present.

The present is history's child

There are things in your past, preserved in memory almost by chance, that only later on, because of the course your own life takes, come to seem proleptic, or significant, or fascinating, when other things don't.

The future doesn't exist. It hasn't happened yet. The past doesn't exist. It has already happened.

Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational.

If you stood motionless in the stream of time, listening to crying voices out of the past, you might presently believe that your feelings or your neighbour's were of puny significance because they had been experienced so often before and would be experienced again when you had gone. Whereas they did matter; they were the only reality; there was no shame in feeling the hurt.