Quotes About Past

The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.

If we want to work out a policy for the present, we must examine the past and prepare for the future, discard the material and elevate the spirit, rely on the individual and exclude the mass.

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.

I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.

I think of my work as a kind of peeling back of the wallpaper of today to reveal the histories buried underneath.

I think anyone who gives you relationship advice goes off of past relationships they have that didn't work. You've got to follow your own path.

There's a desire for me in the work, even when I'm looking at the past, to be looking from the present. It's to be here now. It's looking in the present tense.

Time lost can never be regained

Extraordinary change can happen in your life, but it will take extraordinary people, extraordinary courage and extraordinary faith to believe that this won't be a repeat of your past.

Victory is not possible, if one doesn't learn from the past and mistakes made.

Our post-war generation were struggling to escape the past and the burden of guilt we carried and to find a new way.

Every story about me is so heavy and dramatic. That's not how I do life. But that's the impression people have, and that's what keeps getting reiterated. As if I'm still stuck in all the muck of the past. And I am so not.

Your desires will source you with the inspiration to release your outdated beliefs and let go of whatever behavior is keeping you stuck in the past.

I really love helping students and helping them empathize with people who lived a really long time ago. That's one of the highlights of working in fiction.

I've studied documentarians extensively to come up with my own in-house style. I'm a student of Michael Moore's films, of Eisenstein, Riefenstahl. Leave the politics aside, you have to learn from those past masters on how they were trying to communicate their ideas.

You know, they just don't make big movie stars the way they used to, maybe because the system has changed, the studio system, but it's sad to see people like Jimmy Stewart go, all the giants of the past.

I love the New York that was. The end for me was Studio 54. I don't go out at night anymore.

He was what I often think is a dangerous thing for a statesman to be - a student of history; and like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

That's what we grew up with - the good songs, the good lyrics, the good big-band stuff. I miss that era.

I did have a 1977 Barbie, but I was more into stuffed animals than dolls.

The funny thing about history is that we imagine that people didn't laugh in the old days, but of course they did, at stupid things.

Lovers come back. Styles come back. But time? It never comes back.

I like historical pieces. History was my favorite subject in school, it was the only subject I excelled in. I love the idea of history and the idea that we may have the opportunity to learn from our past mistakes.