Quotes About Past

This is my working definition of history: History is the past reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse. There are times we can get only alternative perspectives on the same event. (There are always alternative perspectives, even when we do not hear them.) But history as argued public reconstruction is necessary to reconstruct our past in order to project our future.

The course of my long life hath reached at last in fragile bark over a tempestuous sea the common harbor, where must rendered be account for all the actions of the past.

It is by a thorough knowledge of the whole subject that [people] are enabled to judge correctly of the past and to give a proper direction to the future.

history ... a sort of immortality turned upside down. Her life stretched backwards through ten centuries.

It's like that, I guess, when the past come to collect what you owe.

I am neither in the past, nor avant-garde. My style follows life.

My future will not copy my fair past, I wrote that once. And, thinking at my side my ministering life-angel justified the word by his appealing look upcast to the white throne of God.

The past is dead except for the life you give it

Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.

In order to live the life we desire, and set the intention for greater happiness and more meaningful connections with others, we have to release the hold that our past has on us

One of the most significant events in our distant past is still perhaps the greatest mystery: the origins of life itself.

A historian is interested in the past because he is interested in life... a deeply felt need to assure the continuity of human life and discover its meaning, even if the goal is never fully realized.

You know, I think I had my first past life recall when I was 7.

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

What you have done causes things to happen. Your situation in life now has been caused, is predicated upon, your previous actions. That is karma.

When you come across someone colorful and vibrant maybe in the present it isn't so interesting, but, in the past, it sheds a wonderful light onto living life.

Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?

Memories were the markers of the journey through life. It was necessary to know where you had come from. Only then could you know where you were going.

To be honest, I tend to romanticize the past, and though I appreciate all the conveniences of modern life, sometimes I yearn for simpler times.

I made the mistake of thinking that if you add up the past, you sum up the future; I forgot how frequently life astonishes us.

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.

Was life like that? You could look ahead to the future or back to the past, but the present moved too quickly to absorb.

In a life which has meaning in it, past and future sustain each other.

What is past is past, there is a future left to all men, who have the virtue to repent and the energy to atone.