Quotes About Past

That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we had then have been swallowed up in the flow of time.

Don't let the past steal your present. This is the message of Christmas: We are never alone.

Emotion only lasts in our bodies for about 90 seconds. After that, the physical reaction dissipates, UNLESS our cognitive brain kicks in and starts connecting our anger with past events.

this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

To remember, to hear and remember, is to stop and walk on again to a livelier, surer measure. It is dangerous to remember the past only for its own sake, dangerous to deliver a message you did not get.

The approach of a man's life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive.

Unlike the history of great events, the history of families and small places forces us to recognize the past as a shadow from which shadowy figures now and then emerge into the light, take on briefly the substance of a story, a part of a story, a few imaginable details, and merge again into the shadow.

The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

They were not going to live again in a time like that.

The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil...It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility...

I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.

Why are old lovers able to become friends? Two reasons. They never truly loved each other, or they love each other still.

We explain by means of purely intellectual processes, but we understand by means of the cooperation of all the powers of the mind in comprehension. In understanding we start from the connection of the given, living whole, in order to make the past comprehensible in terms of it.

The past and present rose side by side, at that supreme moment — and the contrast shook me.

A confused sensation of having suddenly lost my familiarity with the past, without acquiring any additional clearness of idea in reference to the present or the future, took possession of my mind. Circumstances that were but a few days old, faded back in my memory, as if they had happened months and months since.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding

We are choked with News and starved of History.

It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time.As quoted in The Gentle Philosopher Will Durant

Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past.

By imagination and reason we turn experience into foresight; we become the creators of our future, and cease to be the slaves of our past.

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding"5