Quotes About Past

a boy with an unspeakable past was a man with an unendurable future. He was good to look at, good to dance with, probably good to sleep with: but he was no longer good for love.

Perhaps it now occurs to him that in this need to establish himself in his relation to his past [the African American] is most American, that this depthless alienation from oneself and one's people is, in sum, the American experience.

History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.

To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, in unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes one for the other.

We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, is unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes one for the other.

In our view, corporations resemble nations in that they reflect the accumulation of past events and the shaping force of underlying genetics that have roots in prior generations.

She would say that what is past, one cannot change, so each backward glance is a bit of the present slipping away.

Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue.

I told lies and wondered where I would go if my own past was all I had left.

We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.

The Ideal This is where I came from. I passed this way. This should not be shameful Or hard to say. A self is a self. It is not a screen. A person should respect What he has been. This is my past Which I shall not discard. This is the ideal. This is hard.

Your body moves always in the present, the dividing line between the past and the future, but your mind is more free. It can think and is in the present. It can remember and at once is in the past. It can imagine and at once is in the future, in its own choice of all the possible futures. Your mind can travel through time. (Eric Frank Russell, 1941)

So was the Buddha (as translated via Borges): "The man of a past moment has lived, but he does not live nor will he live; the man of a future moment will live, but he has not lived nor does he now live; the man of the present moment lives, but he has not lived nor will he live." We

We are anxious in the face of our unchangeable past; we long to recreate segments of our private histories, but we are stuck with them.

I've seen too many comments, too many stories from a fan, or first-time fans that have come to a race in years past and the first thing they say is, 'I seen the Confederate flag flying, it made me feel uncomfortable.'

It's not uncommon to have at least one friend that you used to mess with, and it didn't work out. But still, there's mad love there.

Even in the past, going out to Germany to fight for the world title I was the underdog, was getting no praise and I went in there very confident I would win and that's what happened.

Perhaps we underestimated the challenges in Afghanistan in the past. That's why we are now strengthening and intensifying our commitment.

Music, in the past few years... anything singable or understandable is square.

Not to sound too Dr. Phil all of a sudden, but I think the key to survival is to embrace one's past and to not run away from it. And to come to some sort of relationship with it or understanding of it.

'The UnAmericans' is a compassionate and brilliantly rendered debut - and for a book set largely in the past, these stories feel essential to understanding the contemporary world in which we live.

My past was always there. And I always understood that I was adopted. It wasn't like a massive issue to me. But identity was an issue. I knew that I was Indian, but I didn't really know much about myself, really. I mean, I really disassociated myself from what happened in the past to present. But, it was affecting in regards to identity.

We have become aware of the responsibility for our attitude towards the dark pages in our history. We have understood that bad service is done to the nation by those who are impelling to renounce that past.