Quotes About Past

The trouble with discarding bad memories was that evidently the good ones went with them

crinolines. You'd see the other girls wafting

I've learned that history is the autobiography of the historian, that ignoring the past is the act of a fool, and that loyalty does not mean falling into line, but stepping out of it for the people you love.

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

Mindy had explained that a lot of things had ghosts, not just people. Animals, machines, even things as vast as a paved-over forest or as humble as the smell of good cooking could leave traces of themselves behind. The world was haunted by the past.

One faces the future with one's past.

The upshot of it has been that the spirit of the Past is now widely regarded amongst us as a purely immaterial force pumping a million times a day in the rose-pink heart of every true Irishman.

Let me know that into the knot of self comes the thread called time, and that what I am, disgraced or blessed, came from what I was, goes to what I yet may be.

The analysis, based on past events, certainly seems sound. But following your instincts is the only way you're going to do something unsound.

We have a choice about where to aim the lens of our attention. We can relive past injustices, settle old grudges and nurse festering sores. We can imagine failure, build up its potential for destruction, calculate its odds. Or, we can imagine the generous outcomes we're working on, feel gratitude for those that got us here and revel in the possibilities of what's next.

the fear remains. The old stories of what happened to Joe or Bob or Sue thirty years ago are told over and over. We use them to stoke our fear, to rationalize our desire to hide.

Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.

Was' and 'is' – in English there is very little difference between these two words. Only one letter more , just two letters different. But it is a lifetime, it is a world of difference. Time does not allow you to take the past along with you. Nothing remains unchanged. Love gets diluted, hate is forgotten and friendship and enmity keep shifting all the time. One day, when you look back, you will ask yourself – what was it all about.

Hinduism is great for encouraging social peace, because everyone basically believes their suffering in this life is the result of misdeeds in a past one... So Hinduism is the best antidote to Marxism.

I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself.

History belongs to the past, but understanding it is the duty of the present

We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of history and historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads, and the mud of the future on our feet.

And yet, when to act on that belief causes deep hurt to innocents who had nothing to do with the original wrong -- if there was one -- do we not have a greater responsibility to the present than to the past?

The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.

One cannot take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge

With us the inner nature accords with the outer expectation. The body follows the mind, and the mind seeks the soul, which it strives toward but has not yet won. With you it is otherwise. The mind follows the body in pursuit of the soul you have been told you already have. Because you cannot find it, you assume you have lost it somewhere in your past, and this keeps you from achieving it in your future.

Time went by, swift but interminable. Time past was nothing, no matter how long. Time ahead was everything, no matter how brief.

Bofusdiaga says past wrongs cannot be righted because past wrongs are past and time only runs one way. Bofusdiaga says all you independent creatures suffer great wrongs sometime in the past, which is normal, but you stay always living in the past so you can continue wronged forever! Forever miserable, forever tragical! Bofusdiaga says so long as you go chewing yesterday's pains, you cannot eat today's pleasures, so it is no help!

Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is.