Quotes About Past

If all memories decay, what of them will really ever be left? What is it that's growing from out of the rotting material of old memories? Is every moment of the past simply gone forever? Why can't they be held intact somehow?

There's more that's happened than what's in your memory.

Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last - possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.

How is it possible? Already another year gone by? How could it go so quickly!' Perhaps it is because one takes up too many moments remembering, reliving times past.

Youth fills the time to come with imagination; old age relives the past through memory. The two things are equivalent.

Days lived, whether full or empty, whether busy or serene, are but days gone by, and the ashes of the past weigh the same in every hand. Had

In each epoch memory reconstructs an image of the past that is in accord with the predominant thoughts of the society.

tout semble indiquer qu'il [le passé] ne se conserve pas, mais qu'on le reconstruit en partant du présent.

Every progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past.

Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past.

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future tradition has placed 10 000 men to guard the past

How do we know that it refers to the past? That is the real problem of memory.

The idea of tradition is this double movement: being other in order to be the same, forgetting in order to conserve, producing in order to receive, looking ahead in order to receive the entire force of the past.

There is a temporal style of the world, and time remains the same because the past is a former future and a recent present, the present an impending past and a recent future, the future a present and even a past to come; because, that is, each dimension of time is treated or aimed at as something other than itself and because, finally, there is at the core of time a gaze.

Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, that, retrospectively, we can always find in our past the anticipation of what we have become.

There is a self-knowledge that is not knowledge and is not self-consciousness; there is a presence of the past that is not in fact given in it, but also not what I will in the instant; and there is a doing that is not the fiat of a closed signification.

True development, true maturation, consists in a double phenomenon of both surpassing and maintaining the past. To truly surpass the past is also to conserve it; in becoming something more, one must not refuse to affirm what one has been.

There is no contradiction between reflection as enveloping the past and the past as enveloping my present, because we are communicating through the depth-dimension. According to the depth-dimension, we are in the past and the past lives in us...We are moments of the open field...which is Sinngenesis, sense in genesis, emerging once and for all.

The perceptual synthesis is a temporal synthesis. Subjectivity, at the level of perception, is nothing other than temporality...In every moment of focusing, my body ties a present, a past, and a future together. It secretes time, or rather it becomes that place in nature where for the first time events, rather than pushing each other into being, project a double horizon of the past and future around the present and acquire a historical orientation.

Forgetfulness and rnemory recalled are two modes of our oblique relation with a past that is present to us only through the determinate void that it leaves in us. These phenomenological descriptions are always somewhat misleading because they limit themselves to unraveling the negative in the positive and the positive in the negative.

The moment that one understands time as chiasm then past and present are Ineinaander, each enveloping-enveloped--and that itself is the flesh.

The social is at the interior of the individual and the individual is at the interior of the social, since the past individual is himself interpsychologic from birth...There is no competition between psychology and interpsychology...All is social and all is individual.

There must be a presence of the past which is absence.

And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled.