Quotes About Past

We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.

The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do. Know is not the only word that fosters this illusion. In common usage, the words intuition and premonition also are reserved for past thoughts that turned out to be true.

When no recent event comes to mind, more distant memories govern.

Your inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events.

Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control.

Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined.

The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do.

The Illusions of Pundits The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained

What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.

flawed stories of the past shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future. Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.

watercooler conversations that intelligently explore the lessons that can be learned from the past while resisting the lure of hindsight and the illusion of certainty.

It was both odd and unjust, a real example of pitiful arbitrariness of existance, that you were born into a particular time & held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-a-vis the future.

È bizzarro e ingiusto, disse Gauss, il fatto che si nasce in una determinata epoca e, volenti o nolenti, vi si resta imprigionati: un esempio calzante della penosa accidentalità dell'esistenza. Così uno ha un vantaggio spropositato rispetto al passato e diventa lo zimbello del futuro.

Seltsam sei es und ungerecht, sagte Gauß, so recht ein Beispiel für die erbärmliche Zufälligkeit der Existenz, dass man in einer bestimmten Zeit geboren und ihr verhaftet sei, ob man wolle oder nicht. Es verschaffe einem einen unziemlichen Vorteil vor der Vergangenheit und mache einen zum Clown der Zukunft.

It was both odd and injust, a real example of the pitiful arbitrariness of existence, that you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-a-vis the future.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system." —WILLIAM JAMES, AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER

You cannot disconnect the future from the present and you cannot disconnect the present from the past. That's not how time works. Time moves in a continuous motion.

If the past is a wall with some holes, the future is a hole with no walls.

Café ? Le bureau du divisionnaire Coudrier est un vieux souvenir qui n'a pas changé.

veil that hides the future from us is woven by an angel of mercy. Unfortunately, there's no veil that can shield us from our past. It's filled with ghosts. The ghosts of loved ones. The ghosts of enemies. They're with us always. They're here with us now.

I think I liked you better when you were a contract killer.

It reinforced my sense of living in a coherent universe, of belonging to something important that stretched over time, of being a link in a chain - indebted to many in the past, mostly unknown to me, and responsible to many in the future, who likewise will not know who I was.

For most of us, space is the concrete thing that time is like.3 Studies reveal that people all over the world imagine time as though it were a spatial dimension, which is why we say that the past is behind us and the future is in front of us, that we are moving toward our senescence and looking back on our infancy, and that days pass

The past was a minefield about which few maps seemed to agree. And why should that surprise me? It's a big place. p. 30