Quotes About Past

Tudo deve ter um início; e esse início deve estar ligado a algo que já existiu antes.

El aspecto encantador de la naturaleza me elevaba el ánimo; el pasado se me borraba de la memoria; el presente era tranquilo, y el futuro embellecido, por rayos luminosos de esperanza y expectativas de alegría.

the past was blotted from my memory, the present was tranquil, and the future gilded by bright rays of hope, and anticipations of joy.

Seems he and the Master Chief had spent part of the night reminiscing about their past.

events are shaped by history rather than vice versa.

the genome contains secret messages from both the distant and the recent past – from when we were single-celled creatures and from when we took up cultural habits such as dairy farming. It also contains clues to ancient philosophical conundrums, not least the question of whether and how our actions are determined and what is this curious sensation called free will.

That's what her kind of politics is all about, right? The past is this sacred, glorified thing? Even though it never really existed in the first place." I

Want to make it a date, haircut?' she asked. 'As soon as I can scrape together the cash for the train ticket?' What's with the haircut, kiddo ?' he asked. 'I thought we were past that.' We'll never be past that,' she said.

He thought that he had believed it was a simple sequence, the past and the present, and if there was loss in the past one was compensated by pain in the present, and pain gave it a form of immortality—but he had not known that one could destroy like this, kill retroactively—so that to her it had never existed.

The philosophers of the past were superficial," Dr. Pritchett went on. "It remained for our century to redefine the purpose of philosophy. The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn't any.

The prisoners liked to talk about their past. Their memories were the only future they had.

Held motionless by wonder, she stood looking at him, taking this moment, not in the name of the present, but as a salute to their past.

i could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream.

Stories are not mere flights of fantasy or instruments of political power and control. They link us to our past, provide us with critical insight into the present and enable us to envision our lives not just as they are but as they should be or might become. Imaginative knowledge is not something you have today and discard tomorrow. It is a way of perceiving the world and relating to it.

What I am searching for is the gaps - the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. You sift through the rubble, pick up one fragment here, another there, label it and record where you found it, noting the time and date of discovery. It is not just the foundations I am looking for but something at once more and less tangible.

When I left class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of dream?

At some point, the truth of Iran's past became as immaterial to those who appropriated it as the truth of Lolita's is to Humbert. It became immaterial in the same way that Lolita's truth, her desires and life, must lose color before Humbert's one obsession, his desire to turn a twelve-year-old unruly child into his mistress.

We in ancient countries have our past--we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

the resilience they had both displayed, the same stubborn strength that had lifted them out of bad circumstances. Except in Auma I had also sensed a willingness to put the past behind her, a capacity to somehow forgive, if not necessarily forget.

I began to understand the true nature of my adversary. I wasn't running against Hillary Clinton or John Edwards or even the Republicans. I was running against the implacable weight of the past; the inertia, fatalism, and fear it produced.

Je commençais à comprendre qui était réellement mon adversaire. Ce n'était pas contre Hillary Clinton ou contre John Edwards que je me battais, ni même contre les républicains. Je me battais contre le poids implacable du passé ; contre l'inertie, le fatalisme et la peur qu'il engendrait.

I recognize that there are those who believe that it's time to discard the myth—that an examination of America's past and an even cursory glance at today's headlines show that this nation's ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start.

There was certainly plenty in her own past that she was reluctant to look at. Because looking made it real.

The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present.