Quotes About Past

The future was clay, to be molded day by day, but the past was bedrock, immutable.

Theoretical considerations require that what is to-day the object of a phobia must at one time in the past have been the source of a high degree of pleasure.

Freud said to Putnam: We are what we are because we have been what we have been.

No podemos sino atenernos a la conclusión de que en la vida psíquica la conservación de lo pretérito es la regla más bien que una curiosa excepción.

For those particular illusions there may well have been a past; it is problematic, however, if there is now much of a future.

In states of acute crisis analysis is to all intents and purposes unusable. The ego's whole interest is taken up by the painful reality and it withholds itself from analysis, which is attempting to go below the surface and uncover the influences of the past.

His father used to accuse his mother of not being able to let anything go. She needed to learn to put the past behind her, instead of dwelling on what couldn't be changed. Don't be like your mother, he warned Cole, unless you want to be depressed.

He had spent his whole life listening to stories from the past and now he had his own, and it was slowly building chapter by chapter.

The shutter of the photographer's camera makes that repeated mechanical sound. That unlocking and locking of the doors of light to send momentary images of the present into the light trap of the past.

Not only has there never before been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its immediate past, but there has never before been a society that is able to access the immediate past so easily and so copiously.

It is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness.

The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.

I]'m reliving it street by street, hour by hour, with the mission of neutralizing it, and transforming it into an inoffensive past that i can keep in my heart without either disowning it or suffering from it. That's not easy. It's at once painful and poetic.

From the top of the hill I look at the path travelled, and the entire path is present in the joy of my success. The walk gives the rest its worth, and my thirst gives the glass of water its worth. A whole past comes together in the moment of enjoyment

It is quite certain that the surpassing of the past toward the future always demands sacrifices; to claim that in destroying an old quarter in order to build new houses on its ruins one is preserving it dialectically is a play on words; no dialectic can restore the old port of Marseilles; the past as something not surpassed, in its flesh and blood presence, has completely vanished.

Little star that I see, Drawn by the moon.' The old words, just as they were first written... They were a link joining me to past centuries, when the stars shone exactly as they do today. And this rebirth and this permanence gave me a feeling of eternity.

All that a stubborn optimism can claim is that the past does not concern us in this particular and fixed form and that we have sacrificed nothing in sacrificing it; thus, many revolutionaries consider it healthy to refuse any attachment to the past and to profess to scorn monuments and traditions.

Á chaque instant il peut saisir la vérité intemporelle de son existence; mais entre le passé qui n'est plus, et l'avenir qui n'est pas encore, cet instant où il existe n'est rien.

The past is an appeal; it is an appeal toward the future which sometimes can save it only by destroying it.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

Le temps, par son cours, use et détruit ce qui est temporel. Aussi y-a-t-il plus d'éternité dans le passé que dans le présent. Valeur de l'histoire bien comprise analogue à celle du souvenir dans Proust. Ainsi le passé nous présente quelque chose qui est à la fois réel et meilleur que nous, et qui peut nous tirer ver le haut, ce que l'avenir ne fait jamais.

Human beings have roots by virtue of their real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape particular treasures of the past and particular expectations for the future.

The invisible is more substantial than the visible; ?he future shapes the past; The new is more fundamental than the old.

The European, the aristocrat, feels that he is responsible to past generations to carry on the culture they have formed. He feels that graciousness, agreeable manners, loyalty to his own people, are more important