Quotes About Past

Marcel Proust

It seems that events extend further than the moments in which they happen, and cannot be completely contained within them. Certainly, they spill over into the future through the memories we retain of them, but they also demand space in the time that precedes them. Certainly you will say that at that time we do not see them as they will actually be, but are they not also changed in our memory of them?

Marcel Proust

The past lies hidden beyond the mind's realm and reach, in some material object (in the sensation that material object gives us). And it depends entirely on chance whether or not we encounter that object before we die.

The archives of the château would be of interest to you. There is some absolutely fascinating correspondence between all the most prominent figures in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. I spend many very happy hours there, living in the past," the Comtesse assured me, and I was reminded of M. de Guermantes remarking that she was an extremely cultured woman as far as literature was concerned.

The difference in the making of these sorts of sorrows is that they come from the outside world and take the shortest and most painful route to the heart. The image of the woman we love, though we think it has a pristine authenticity, has actually been often made and remade by us. And the memory that wounds is not contemporaneous with the restored image; it dates from a very different time; it is one of the few witnesses to a monstrous past.

The broad daylight of habitual memory gradually fades our images of the past, wears them away until nothing is left of them and the past becomes irrecoverable.

At last, in Albertine walking with the lady in gray down the little street that led to the bath-house, I saw before my eyes a fragment of that past which seemed to me no less mysterious and terrifying than I had feared when I imagined it enclosed within Albertine's eyes and within her memories.

No juegues con los muertos y no acaricies sus rostros. No te rías de ellos y no los llores; olvídalos. No te fíes de las cosas pasadas. No te pongas a construir bellos ataúdes para los momentos pasados: piensa en matar los momentos que vendrán. Desconfía de todos los cadáveres. No abraces a los muertos: pues ahogan a los vivos.

There is nothing more dangerous than history used as a defense, or history used for preaching; history used as a tool is no longer history.

Hace unos días encontré, entremedio de sus papeles, el discurso que dio el arquitecto Renzo Piancuando cuandofue galardonado con el Pritzker. Natasha había subrayado la siguiente frase: «Ã¢â'¬Â¦ y asi seguimos remando contra la corriente empujados sin pausa hacia el pasado. Es una imagen maravillosa, que representa la condición humana. El pasado es un refugio seguro, una tentación constante y, sin embargo, el futuro es el único sitio donde podemos ir».

La vida hay que vivirla mirando hacia el futuro, pero solo se entiende si tenemos en cuenta nuestro pasado.

Ma ancora una volta si ripete che l'unico passato reale è quello che perdura nella memoria e che l'unica perdurabile memoria è la scrittura. [...] Forse la letteratura, forse la mia letteratura, rettifica, non svolge altra missione che quella di perfezionare il passato affinché l'avvenire si riprometta di non essere da meno (196).

Every man's life lies within the present for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain.

How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time, the past and the future, in which all things disappear.

Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past.

Over the last week, if there's anything I've learned, it's that you're only who you choose to be. Every moment. The past is gone. Memories are no more solid than dreams. The only real thing, the only true thing, is the present. That's it." -- "So the things we've done don't count?" "Of course they do. But we can decide how much. ?And we can decide what we want the present to be like. We can live it however we want.

But there was no pressing CTRL+Z on a day, no loading a previous copy.

Not to know the events which happened before one was born, that is to remain always a boy.

To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.