Quotes About Past

If we disown history we are at its mercy. To have a reasonable knowledge of the past is to possess an anchor which is likely to prevent us from being swept towards false ideas about the present and future.

The age of recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia--when was the past so hauntingly accessible?--but its bitterest insight is the incapacity of even the most perfectly captured sound to restore the moment of its first inscribing. That world is no longer there.

earliest examples are dated to the first century

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

Forget the past - the future will give you plenty to worry about.

My father wasn't inclined to talk much about his past, and when he did—when I pressed him for details and he began to reminisce about his youth—he became so dull and long-winded that I soon regretted ever asking him anything.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

When our perils are past, shall our gratitude sleep?

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.

The future will be the child of the past and the present, even if a rebellious child.

She had no remembrance of my name, or the Seraskiers'—I asked, with a beating heart. We had left no trace. Twelve short years had effaced all memory of us!

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

A cardinal tenet of conservatism is that social inertia is – and ought to be – strong. It discourages and, if necessary, defeats the political grandiosity of those who would attempt to engineer the future by rupturing connections with the past.

The nation provided a human with the things that are most human—language and a past that stretched back before his birth.

He'd left for a reason, and I didn't want to be anyone's blast from the past. Still, not knowing was worse than any potential awkwardness.

We read history in order not to have to repeat it. When I

Però per què em dius tot això? Jo odio el meu passat! L'odio! - Perquè ell és tu i tu ets ell.

She thought of the past that was both near and distant at the same time, undoubtedly because of the grim intrusion of the war. She pictured her husband, a heavy, bored man, interested only in money, land and local politics. She had never loved him; she had married him because her father wished it. Born and brought up in the countryside, she had little experience of the outside world, with the exception of a few brief trips to Paris to visit an elderly relative.

Nostalgic longing is always for an elsewhere. Remembrance is the affirmation of what brought us here.

Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.

You seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all.

I am just a past with no present.

Yet it all seemed inevitable and perhaps it was. Is it fruitless to think about the past and build up coherent pictures of how one's life went wrong?