Quotes About Past

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, but the past perfect!

If you want to touch the past, touch a rock. If you want to touch the present, touch a flower. If you want to touch the future, touch a life.

I love the English aesthetic; in a way, I feel it is close to my own, a beautiful chaos; it is a powerful mix of the past and the present.

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

It is, then, by those shadows of the hoary Past and their fantastic silhouettes on the external screen of every religion and philosophy, that we can, by checking them as we go along, and comparing them, trace out finally the body that produced them.

It is imperative that the past of the pilgrims' progress be intentionally carried forward into the present as we work into our future. Without it we cannot know who we are, why we are here, or where we can go. Without a common past to live out of we become aimless and wandering individuals instead of a pilgrim people.

Helen, Helen, come home; there was a Helen before there was a War, but who remembers her?

Could beauty be caught and hurt they had done her to death with their sneers in ages and ages past, could beauty be sacrificed for a thrust of a sword, for a piece of thin money tossed up to fall half alloy— then beauty were dead long, long before we saw her face.

Our past cannot be changed, and to be preoccupied with it is inefficient in time and effort. Likewise, by fretting over the future, we only exhaust ourselves, making us less able to effectively respond when the future is actually upon us. By worrying about a mishap that may or may not take place, we're forced to undergo the event twice—once when imagining it and once again if and when we actually experience it.

The young should not think of themselves as immature and the elderly need not view themselves as feeble. Our minds control our bodies. Have no age, transcend both past and future, and enter into naka-ima—the "eternal present.

Guilt cannot change the past any more than worry can change the future

Negative feelings about the past bring negativity to the present

And when the spring breezes blow up the valley; when the spring sun shines on last year's withered grass on the river banks; and on the lake; and on the lake's two white swans; and coaxes the new grass out of the spongy soil in the marshes - who could believe on such a day that this peaceful, grassy valley brooded over the story of our past; and over its spectres?

and I was afraid because I knew I had outgrown my past before I could see a path to my future.

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.

Augustine's concept of time was sacramental: time participates in the eternity of God's life, and it is this participation that is able to gather past, present, and future together into one.11

La vieja conocía el futuro porque conocía el pasado, y su familiaridad con las cosas de la vida le permitían comprender y, por lo tanto, aceptar sin rencor, la eterna tragedia de la naturaleza: es menester que la carne perezca para que la carne pueda vivir.

In fact history does not belong to us but we belong to it.

'Caught' is a novel of forgiveness, and the past and the present - who should be and who shouldn't be forgiven. None of my books are ever just about thrills, or it won't work.

The only difference between the East and the West seems to be that you have ancestors and we are going to be ancestors.

In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked...

In that book which she and her simple old friend had read so much together, she had seen and taken to her young heart the image of one who loved the little child; and, as she gazed and mused, He had ceased to be an image and a picture of the distant past, and come to be a living, all-surrounding reality. His love enfolded her childish heart with more than mortal tenderness; and it was to Him, she said, she was going, and to his home. But

children are the carriers of whatever has been left unresolved from the generations that went before.

In het ene landschap was ik het vorige vergeten, zoals je op straat onafgebroken gezichten ziet, die je onafgebroken vergeet