Quotes About Past

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

The scientist thus learns truth experimentally or mathematically; the strategist reasons at least partly by analogy with the past – first establishing which events are comparable and which prior conclusions remain relevant.

Tradition matters because it is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if every course of action were available to them. they may deviate from the previous trajectory only within a finite margin. the great statesmen act at the outer limit of that margin. if they fall short, society stagnates. if they exceed it, they lose the capacity to shape posterity.

were history confined to the mechanical repetition of the past, no transformation would ever have occurred. Every great achievement was a vision before it became a reality. In that sense, it arose from commitment, not resignation to the inevitable.

It is not often that nations learn from the past,even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.

I'm 36 and if I met a woman of my own age and married her, I'd also be marrying her former life, her past. It might be OK for some people - I don't want to judge it or anything - but it's not for me. It would destroy my creativity.

The past is the Jabberwock. Forget not the fallen, but beware the jaws and claws. With your vorpal blade going snicker-snack, kill the fucker, as you go galumphing on.

The Sun-Dial at Wells College The shadow by my finger cast Divides the future from the past: Before it, sleeps the unborn hour In darkness, and beyond thy power: Behind its unreturning line, The vanished hour, no longer thine: One hour alone is in thy hands,-- The NOW on which the shadow stands.

Trust no future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act, — act in the living Present! Heart within and God o'erhead.

Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act -- act in the living Present! Heart within and God overhead.

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future.

All at once I felt clearly and calmly that the feeling of that time had gone never to return, like the time itself, and that to bring it back now would be not only impossible, but painful and forced.

In spite of the many pills she swallowed and the drops and powders out of the little bottles and boxes of which Madame Schoss, who was fond of such things, made a large collection, and in spite of being deprived of the country life to which she was accustomed, youth prevailed. Natasha's grief began to be overlaid by the impressions of daily life, it ceased to press so painfully on her heart, it gradually faded into the past, and she began to recover physically.

those moments when once and for all a man shows his worth and that his whole past has not been in vain but has been a preparation for those moments.

Time is an illusion of life; the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present.

So many memories of the past rise up when you try to resurrect in your imagination the features of a beloved being, that peering through those memories you see the features dimly, as if through tears - the tears of imagination.

If we were angels once, why did we end up lower?" asked Nikolai. "No, that can't be!" "Not lower, who told you it's lower?...How do I know what I used to be?

I'm not a very nostalgic person. I don't really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations.

How sweet time feels when it's too late

What I loved in my old life--I haven't forgotten--it lives in my spine.

We are all prisoners of our past. It shapes and defines us and can no more be forgotten than changed.

We may be through with our past, but the past isn't through with us.