Quotes About Past

Talking about the old days made Kate anything but nostalgic; actually, despite what everybody said about youth, most of her past made her shudder, in sheer disgust and in relief that she didn't have to live it over again.

The past is certain, the future obscure.

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. The expression of history in things is no other than that of past torment.

Despair has the accent of irrevocability not because things cannot improve, but because it draws the past too into its vortex.

The object of such historiography is to disconnect everyone from a real sense of a living past and a living culture.

One's past is not one's destiny, and it is self-serving to pretend that it is. If henceforth I were miserable, it would be my own fault: and I vowed never to waste my substance on petty domestic conflict.

It is one thing for traditions to die out of themselves; it is quite another for them to be killed by men who think they know everything, by men whose vengeance extends even to the past, even to the dead.

Every American election summons the individual voter to weigh the past against the future.

We are the heirs of the ages

Everybody's style of speaking is a mixture of echoes dating from different epochs of the past: hers recalls the prudent and modest civil servants of the last century who were proud that they represented the state and who took care not to compromise themselves by saying the wrong thing.

Everything that is remembered about the past is washed, and often drowned, in nostalgia, pride, illusions and passions of all kinds.

Divination is the quest to understand more about the past, present, and future. In other words, Tarot readings are an attempt to understand ourselves better and discover how we might live better in the future.

Max had been a cat as long as he could remember, but he was pretty sure he'd been a rock star in one of his previous lives. He just had that kind of cool about him.

Remember that lost time does not return.

human behaviour lie not only in the past but in man's ability to contemplate the future, or estimate probabilities:

The more carefully we examine the history of the past, the more reason shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that our age has been fruitful of new social evils. The truth is that the evils are, with scarcely an exception, old. That which is new is the intelligence which discerns and the humanity which remedies them.

For the history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement. Those who compare the age on which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in their imagination may talk of degeneracy and decay: but no man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present

History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another.

Neurotic guilt scans the horizons of the past relentlessly seeking out the most deplorable, hideous, and culpable acts which are least consistent with one's self image. This process is similar to the infinite passion of intensified anxiety for seeking the worst conceivable possibilities in order to alert the whole organism to potential danger.

[W]hat mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.

The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.