Quotes About Past

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

History, said Bacon, is the planks of a shipwreck; more of the past is lost than has been saved.

Society is a growth in time, not a syllogism in logic; and when the past is put out through the door it comes in at the window.

The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech-- is, of necessity, my sole concern.

In hours of bliss we oft have met: They could not always last; And though the present I regret, I'm grateful for the past.

It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.

A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.

It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.

Why yes he thought it ain't a place a man wants to go back to; the place dont even need to be there no more. What aches a man to go back to is what he remembers. from... THE MANSION page 106

All the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

and the very old men--some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.

It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.

the very old men [...] believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him.

He fled, not from his past, but to escape his future. It took him twelve years to learn you cannot escape either of them.

Only yesterday was a wilderness ordinary

It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the same and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.

the persistent nostalgia that infected most surfers, even young ones - the notion that it was always better yesterday, and better still the day before.

No matter how you love, you cannot repay the debts contracted in the loved one's past, nor interfere with how the loved one tries to repay them. But you must pay, you do though you cannot.

She was a page torn from a calendar, a year folded neatly and laid aside in some place you never look.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

The future is there, Cayce hears herself say, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.

When you raise the dead, they bring their baggage.

This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.