Quotes About Past

There seemed to be nothing left in the world, for I felt that Roland had taken with him all my future and Edward all my past.

But I know these things will never come back,

A person without a rich and complex past is like an infant, who has no ability to interpret any text.

These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

Enormous cemeteries existed among sedentary civilizations, where the weight of the past grew larger than any present time.

No decision or action is made without a thought, and a thought , no matter how subtle, is generated out of the past. All thoughts and actions arise out of predisposing influences of myriad sorts; and the self is manufactured out of thoughts.

It ain't ever over. You can't have no future if you don't have no past, and the past ain't never done with you...At the end of your life, all you have is what you know.'

It ain't ever over. You can't have no future if you don't have no past, and the past ain't never done with you.

The Price of Neglect A PUBLIC THAT'S illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself confused during wartime. Without standards of historical comparison, people prove ill-equipped to make informed judgments when the dogs of war are unleashed. Neither U.S. politicians nor most citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair.

A pioneering figure in the past, the future was the president of the present. You are sitting. But the future wants your chair. She is demanding.

I was crazy back then, I must admit. I had an extreme attitude.

I just really gravitate towards a nostalgia for a time when things were simpler. When beauty was more classical and glamorous.

The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone

I drift along, thinking about the past a great deal. The past is so reliable, so delightful, and the best place to live. I end up there quite often, you know; it's very comfortable and dependable.

The best memories are those which we have forgotten.

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.

Something to remember on your birthday..Forget the past, it can't be changed..And, forget the present because I didn't get you one.

Not only am I a spender, I have had a couple of business people in the past who have been spending my money quite happily.

Oh, I know all about my mother and me,' you may say. 'All that business with my mother was over years ago.' You don't and it wasn't.

A stone has been cast into the reliable immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery

To be completely ignorant of the collective past seems to me to be another state of amnesia; you would be untethered, adrift in time. Which is why all societies have sought some kind of memory bank, whether by way of folklore, story-telling, recitation of the ancestors--from Homer to Genesis. And why the heritage industry does so well today; most people may not be particularly interested in the narrative of the past, in the detail or the discussion, but they are glad to know that it is there.

History is not so much memory as collective evidence. It is what has happened, what is thought to have happened, what some claim to have happened. The collective past is fact and fabrication--much like our private pasts. There is no received truth, just a tenuous thread of events amid a swirl of dispute and conflicting interpretation. But... the past is real. This is simplistic, but also, for me, awe-inspiring. I am silenced when I think about it: the great ballast of human existence.

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.

But 'if ' is not a word to use in history.