Quotes About Past

If you want respect for your past, it means that you have a problem with your present and even more with your future.

If we don't respect the past, we'll find it harder to build a future.

I have respect for the past, but I'm a person of the moment.

I have great respect for the past.

When people say that German or any other language is romantic... all they really mean is that they've enjoyed a past in the language

So sad, so fresh the days that are no more.

The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.

Sono il profeta di ciò che è stato, io leggo il passato nel palmo della mano della donna che amo, prevedo le piogge invernali già cadute, sono un esperto della neve dell'anno scorso, richiamo dagli inferi le cose che sono state, vaticino ieri e ier l'altro. Sono il profeta di ciò che è stato

The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.

Bygone troubles are good to tell.

Bygone troubles are a pleasure to talk about.

When we feel haunted, it is the pull of our own home we're experiencing, but a more upsetting possibility is that the past has become homeless, and we are offering it a place to inhabit in the present.

Yet in retrospect, with the present to vindicate the past, everyone can claim the illusory status of being a seer.

When we feel haunted, it is the pull of our old home we're experiencing, but a more upsetting possibility is that the past has become homeless, and we are offering it a place to inhabit in the present.

The gods of the past are considered simply as idols in our day and the virtues of the distant past would be, at present, moral defects which would prevent men from winning the battle of life, whose ideal is The Best for which all the faculties should strive.

We were fishers of memory waiting on the banks of time and waiting for the past to swallow the date.

because my memory had caught up with the world that had gone away.

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom - we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.

Though historians occasionally try their hand at prophecy (without notable success), the study of history aims above all to make us aware of possibilities we don't normally consider. Historians study the past not in order to repeat it, but in order to be liberated from it.

Whatever path we take, the first step is to acknowledge the complexity of the dilemma and to accept that simplistically dividing the past into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere. Unless, of course, we are willing to admit that we usually follow the lead of the bad guys.

Esta es la mejor razón para aprender historia: no para predecir el futuro, sino para desprendernos del pasado e imaginar destinos alternativos. Desde luego, esto no supone la libertad total: no podemos evitar estar moldeados por el pasado. Pero algo de libertad es mejor que ninguna.

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn't want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape – and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.

To write past events in the present tense adds immediacy to your prose. ~Yvonne Blackwood