Quotes About Past

silence remains indispensable today as it was in the past. The Word of God is born out of the eternal silence of God, and it is to this Word out of silence that we want to be witnesses.

He betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if they dared but avow it, and might have a future, if they could but divine it.

Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.

Throughout history the world has been laid waste to ensure the triumph of conceptions that are now as dead as the men that died for them.

The volume is therefore primarily one of exposition. It makes no claim to originality with regard to any of the chief ideas that it expounds. Rather its effort is to show that many of the ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it.

Wasn't history full of the destruction of precious things?

she freely admitted that of old she had been a little mad, and now she pretended to be perfectly sane.

There seemed to Isabel in these days something sacred in Gardencourt; no chapter of the past was more perfectly irrecoverable. When she thought of the months she had spent there the tears rose to her eyes.

It was in her disposition at all times to lose faith in the reality of absent things; she could summon back her faith, in case of need, with with an effort, but the effort was often painful even when the reality had been pleasant. The past was apt to look dead and its revival rather to show the livid light of a judgement-day.

To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumor kept her imagination awake.

The past came back to her in one of those rushing waves of emotion by which persons of sensibility are visited at odd hours.

El público español ha tendido a preferir la imagen del pasado del país a través de las novelas. En España ha habido una tendencia a promover una actitud en la que la ficción histórica se considera superior a la historia investigada.

We live entirely in the past, nourished by dead thoughts, dead creeds, dead sciences. And it is the past which is engulfing us, not the future. The future always has and always will belong to—the poet.

There's something obscene in this love of the past which ends in breadlines and dugouts. Something obscene about this spiritual racket which permits an idiot to sprinkle holy water over Big Berthas and dreadnoughts and high explosives. Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

And inevitably there always crept into our discussions the figure of Whitman, that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of her brief life. In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said.

Everything that belongs to the past seems to have fallen into the sea; I have memories, but the images have lost their vividness, they seem dead and desultory, like time - bitten mummies stuck in a quagmire.

Contemplando el pasado, parece que siempre leí en posición incómoda. (Que es la forma en que escriben la mayoría de los escritores, según compruebo). Pero lo leído penetró. Lo importante es, y debo recalcarlo, que leía sin desviar la atención con todas mis facultades que poseía.

My eye, but I've been all over that ground.. years and years ago. I've lived out my melancholy youth. I don't give a fuck anymore what's behind me, or what's ahead of me. I'm healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today! Le bel aujourd'hui!

He was an incurable dandy living the life of a beggar. And living wholly in the past!

a lucid french idea that gauges right through your drunkenness and leaves you swimming helplessly in the past, in a fluid dream that makes you wide awake and yet doesn't jar your nerves.

Wisely the Hebrews admit no Present tense in their language; While we are speaking the word, it is is already the Past.

Nor deem the irrevocable Past As wholly wasted, wholly vain, If, rising on its wrecks, at last To something nobler we attain.

Trust no future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act,--act in the living present! Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory.