Quotes About Past

Notice that close to two centuries ago people had an idealized opinion of their own past, just as we have an idealized opinion of today's past.

Simply, things that move, and therefore require knowledge, do not usually have experts, while things that don't move seem to have some experts. In other words, professions that deal with the future and base their studies on the nonrepeatable past have an expert problem (with the exception of the weather and businesses involving short-term physical processes, not socioeconomic ones).

We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened.

they can cherry-pick from statements they've made in the past, many of them contradictory, and end up convincing themselves of their intellectual lucidity

those who are very good at predicting the past will think of themselves as good at predicting the future

It took us a while to discover that we do effectively think, but that we more readily narrate backward in order to give ourselves the illusion of understanding, and give a cover to our past actions.

You take past instances that corroborate your theories and you treat them as evidence.

Next let me show how the future is mostly in the past.

he who does not have a past has no future.6

Clearly you cannot manufacture more information than the past can deliver; if you buy one hundred copies of The New York Times, I am not too certain that it would help you gain incremental knowledge of the future. We just don't know how much information there is in the past.

Los hallazgos de Popper y de Poincaré limitan nuestra capacidad para ver en el futuro, haciendo de éste un reflejo muy complicado del pasado, si es que existe tal reflejo.

The bias lowers our perception of the risks we incurred in the past, particularly for those of us who were lucky to have survived them. Your

En cambio, después de la guerra, el mundo se presentaba enorme, ignoto y sin confines. Mi madre sin embargo volvió a vivirlo como pudo. Volvió a vivirlo con alegría, porque tenía un carácter alegre. Su espíritu no sabía envejecer y no conoció nunca la vejez, que consiste en quedarse humillado en un rincón llorando el desmoronamiento del pasado.

what knowledge haunts each body, what history, what phantom ache?

In the narrative of my life, which is the look backward rather than forward into the unknown and unstoried future, I emerged from the pool as from a baptismal font—changed, reborn—as if I had been shown what would be my calling even then. This is how the past fits into the narrative of our lives, gives meaning and purpose. Even my mother's death is redeemed in the story of my calling, made meaningful rather than merely senseless. It is the story I tell myself to survive.

This is how the past interrupts our lives, all of it entering the same doorway--like the hole in the trunk of my neighbor's tree: at once a natural shelter, haven for small creatures, but also evidence of injury, an entrance for decay.

Unhealing pain from the past, because of the sense of debilitation it often provokes and the defenses people typically set against it, represents yet another barrier in the quest for stronger self-esteem.

All human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.

The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.

These names of gentleman and lady had a meaning, in the past history of the world, and conferred privileges, desirable, or otherwise, on those entitled to bear them. In the present—and still more in the future condition of society—they imply, not privilege, but restriction.

She couldn't live her life as someone's prisoner the way he had lived his, caught up in a dream of the past, with no way forward and no way back, forced to dig down inside oneself.

Izanami - over the long years that she had handed out death - had become a true goddess, and not just that: the quintessential destroyer […] she was the goddess who invited our desire and also our defilement; she bore the weight of the past and lived on into the future for ever. The realisation filled me with overwhelming awe.

All resonates. The past, the present, and the future. The tales we hear as children—the stories we then pass on—have happened, are happening, or will happen soon enough. If not, then the stories would not exist. They resonate in our hearts because they are true. Even the ones that begin as lies.

Leave the past in the past, and live for the moment. That's wisdom you can take to the grave, and dig up when you need it!