Quotes About Past

Memory does not prolong the existence of the past; it is merely one way in which the past has effects.

Un mundo bueno necesita conocimientos, bondad y valor; no necesita el pesaroso anhelo del pasado, ni el aherrojamiento de la inteligencia libre mediante las palabras proferidas hace mucho por hombres ignorantes.

gloom is a useless emotion. In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived.

She wondered why she, herself, was always touched by such infinitesimal things. Their very homeliness and lack of worth seemed connecting the past with the present all the more. It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.

A powerful motivation for believing God in our present is intentionally remembering how He's worked in our past.

Obviously, I'm still building a name and reputation for myself. The stigmas that come with my past will remain there for quite some time, but I'm not afraid to challenge those things, and I never have been.

Most reputations are not ruined but forgotten.

I've done a lot of costume dramas and things that are set in the past, and it's great to be able to have things that you can research and material that you can look at.

I like historical things; I like researching things.

I enjoy the act of research. I'm researching as a means to an end, but I literally just enjoy reading about how people lived in the past and understanding it better.

It is this compulsion to look backwards at a time of crisis because one's got no idea of what lies ahead. There is a notion of security that somehow it must resemble the past. It's never going to. Just because we muddled through in the past doesn't mean we can automatically muddle through in the future.

For me, 'The Kite Runner' became about a guy who's emotionally shut down because he hasn't confronted his past.

I put the movie days totally behind me... It was a part of my past that I really kind of put in a little drawer and shut the door.

I've done interviews in the past where, apparently, I didn't give the journalist any eye contact. I'm a bit shy, yes. I've thought about refusing to do any press at all.

As an adult, it's hard for me to remember my mother before her sickness. But if I go back into childhood, I can access that.

Regarding lack of vision or disabilities of the organ of sight, it has long been known among researchers that it is the effect of extreme cruelty in a past life.

I get along great with all of my exes. That's really cool. That's a good sign.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

My own novel, 'The Silver Bough,' about the inhabitants of a remote town at risk of being overwhelmed by Scotland's mythological past, was once criticised by a disgruntled fan as 'fantasy for people who don't read fantasy.'

I knew from history that war comes with frightening regularity, often fought over the same ground and similar causes as previous conflicts.

In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.

It's fun to play characters with a past, but it's also fun to play any role that is what I would call a 'pressure cooker' kind of character, where the lid is on, and it's left to simmer throughout the movie.

There wasn't so many ISSUES like there are today. It was a simpler time.

What's going on? On the one hand, analogical thinking seems to be our birthright. Metaphorical connections saturate our language, drive our science, enliven our literature, burst out (at least occasionally) in children's speech, and remind us of things past. On the other hand, when experimentalists lead the horse to water, they can't make it drink.