Quotes About Past

Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

However much history may be invoked in support of these policies (affirmative action), no policy can apply to history but can only apply to the present or the future. The past may be many things, but it is clearly irrevocable. Its sins can no more be purged than its achievements can be expunged. Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution.

For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.

Where beliefs are not checked against facts, but instead facts must meet the test of consonance with the prevailing vision, we are in the process of sealing ourselves off from feedback from reality. Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.

Evidence is often particularly abundant when it comes to statements about history, yet the anointed have repeatedly been as demonstrably wrong about the past as about the present or the future—and as supremely confident.

When intellectuals are unable to find enough contemporary grievances to suit their vision or agenda, they can mine the past for harm inflicted by some on others.

We can only become enlightened by acknowledging and releasing what weighs us down: the shadow aspect of the psyche that carries the burden of the past.

Kerwick, tú y yo jamás podremos regresar adonde estábamos antes que vinieran los normandos. Entre nosotros se ha cerrado una puerta. Olvida que fui una vez tu prometida. -Ninguna puerta hay entre nosotros, Aislinn —dijo él con amargura-. Sólo un hombre." El bobo y la paloma.

We know we are a species obsessed with itself and its own past and origins. We know we are capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and gently placing them in museums. Great museums in great cities—the hallmarks of civilisation.

Maybe there's something instinctive in us, that we're drawn to human habitation and can't resist a ruin, the way newborn babies respond to a crude drawing of a face. These are the rarities in human history, the places from which we've retreated. These once-inhabited places play a different air to the uninhabited; they suggest the lost past, the lost Eden, not the Utopia to come.

je t'ai aimé dans le passé je t'aime aujourd hui t'aimerais encore dans l'avenir Le temps revient. I have loved you before I love you today and I will love you again. The time returns.

But there was no way to know, and no way to go back. I could not revise. I had been who I had been, and so I largely remained.

It's amazing how lonely a place where you were once happy can become.

This is because the Greeks had it backward, and no matter how hard humans try thinking otherwise, they still think like Greeks. For the Greeks, when you looked ahead all you saw was the past. It was like the past was the future.

If it wasn't possible to reinvent the past in such a way as to make it conform to the present's cheerful view of the way things ought to have been, why bother living?

I hate when I take a woman to my bed who has already been in yours. I feel like they're comparing us." Grey grinned. "And find you lacking?" As much as he regretted some of his past, he was still a man, with a man's sexual pride. If looks could kill, he'd be on the grass gasping his last. "I doubt it.

What you are is what you have been. What you'll be is what you do now. - Buddha

97 days earlier

At times, my nostalgia for our family life as it used to be--for our own imperfect, cherished, irretrievable past--is nearly overwhelming.

Seto Kaiba: Do you [YÅ«gi] still seek the lost honor of the past? Then I - will take the glory of the future!

He kept his hands off the plastic tablecloth. It was a museum of past meals.

History is like a ghost. It is as dead as alive.

In nonmeditation we see through the illusion of past, present and future - our experience becomes the continuity of nowness. The past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it.

Perhaps George Santayana's famous aphorism that 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' should be reversed – that is, it is because we remember the past that we are condemned to repeat it. The depressing re-emergence of national hatreds in the last