Quotes About Past

The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show.

Here between the hither and the farther shore While time is withdrawn, consider the future And the past with an equal mind.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.

But time past is a time forgotten. We expect the rise of a new constellation.

Of the past you can only see what is past, Not what is always present. That is what matters.

This is the use of memory: For liberation—not less of love but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country Begins as attachment to our own field of action

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past, If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.

Believe me, Michael: Those who flee from the past will always lose the race. I know this from experience. When you reach your goal, Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur, You will find your past failures waiting there to greet you.

will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

It was strange how the future seemed tied inseparably to the past, so that both revolved through the present, like a great wheel...

The past overshadows the present foreshadows the future.

What trouble have you brought to my doorstep, Beka? she asked. I don't see where blaming me for things that began months ago will be useful, I replied.

and even if someone told us we'd forget

I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together

The future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into ever lasting regret if you don't plan for it!

But what was

If you know a person's history, you can use it to help predict what that person might do. A person's history can be the key to understanding his motivation for committing a crime.

I know not why there is such a melancholy feeling attached to the remembrance of past happiness, except that we fear that the future can have nothing so bright as the past.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.

History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.

Only those who are bereaved of all joy in this present world may take refuge in the shadows of the past.