Past Quotes - Page 24

If you're stuck in the past, you go forward in reverse

We cannot move forward if we allow the past to pull us back.

You are the future and don’t waste your energy peeking into your past

Are we slaves of our pasts? or can we rise above it?

Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence. What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream.

The worst time is always the present.

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

I don't think much about guys from the past. I'm glad I knew them, but there's a reason they didn't make it into my future.

If she says goodbye, someone else will say hi.

Past and Future exist in the mind. They exist in the outside world. The mind is shaped by the physical world. Past and future however do NOT exist within the body. Because the present moment is all that you have and will ever be able to experience from within. Presence is how you fully exist. Internal (No-mind, no-time, awareness) is how you fully exist.

Recent generations seem to consider ‘old-fashioned’ thinking as out-dated and without place in the modern world. I beg to differ. After all, who has greater faith? He who looks to and learns from the past, or the man who cares not for consequence?

There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.

... you "met" this Moneta ... or whatever her real name is ... in her past but your future ... in a meeting that's still to come

Never allow yourself to be defined by your past; ‘yesterday’ is just a word, not a dictionary.

You can't know what it is like for us now--you will always be one step behind.Be thankful for that.You can't know what it was like for us then--you will always be one step ahead.Be thankful for that, too.

Sometimes there is no choice but to walk into your own house. Far away, you think, and you do not want to see. You come home and you say do not tell me. You say, I have hunted the elk all over the snowfields of the Selway, and I do not want to know what happened here. And then there is a morning you walk in and take a look in your own house, like any traveler.

Look at these cliffs! Some are abrupt and unpredictable. Some other are soft and with smooth slopes. Yet, they all have the same purpose: either to lure you and bring you down or to teach you how to stand up, firmly, on their rims while contemplating the horizon. Here, you have the perfect vision of the abyss beneath. the majesty of the skies above, or the endlessness of the horizon in front; but you can't see what's behind, and that's how it should be! What's the point in contemplating something that you already know and lived? Haven't your coming here made you know the paths on which you walked? That's why, what belongs to the past should remain there. The past gives us the lessons. We do not need a heavier luggage than this!

If you think that your partner has been cheating, then take a look at their will. If a past lover is in there, then it is probable that some form of infidelity has occurred.

Dwelling on the sins of the past won't help us stop the evils of the present.

Who you are in Christ is far more important and meaningful than whatever has taken place in your past.

Europe is equal to its historical task. Against the anti-spiritual, anti-heroic 'ideals' of America-Jewry, Europe pits its metaphysical ideas, its faith in its Destiny, its ethical principles, its heroism. Fearlessly, Europe falls in for battle, knowing it is armed with the mightiest weapon ever forged by History: the superpersonal Destiny of the European organism. Our European Mission is to create the Culture-State-Nation-Imperium of the West, and thereby we shall perform such deeds, accomplish such works, and so transform our world that our distant posterity, when they behold the remains of our buildings and ramparts, will tell their grandchildren that on the soil of Europe once dwelt a tribe of gods.

... so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

because the past was always around her and might return at any time. It prowled the world searching for her, and she knew it was growing angrier at every passing day.

The past is the best prophet of the future.

I often laughed, and you often gave me a dissatisfied look, till you pressed me to unfold my past before you as if it were a roll of pictures. It was then I felt respect for you. Because you unreservedly showed me your resolution to catch something alive in my being, and to sip the warm blood running in my body, by cutting my heart. At that time, I was still living, and did not want to die. So I rejected your request, promising to satisfy you some day. Now I am going to destroy my heart myself, and pour my blood into your veins. I shall be happy if a new life can enter into your bosom, when my heart has stopped beating.

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.

You are better than your past, greater than your present, and brighter than your future.

There is no future in the past. Any tour into the past is perhaps courage to live at the average level as you did; old and cold, blind and blunt! Come out! Out of the past and change position. You matter, your future matters

She felt her in her heart all the time now, yearning for her lost love and lamenting for past mistakes. The Lady’s grief was overwhelming sometimes, making Sofia sad for no reason at all, especially at night when the world around her grew quiet and there were no distractions.

If you are happy with your past, you visit it often; and strangely, if you are unhappy with your past, you visit it often too!

You didn’t understand the poem, but that was because it wasn’t for you. It was for me to understand the pain you put me through.

There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward—toward what?

Every morning we get a chance to be different. A chance to change. A chance to be better. Your past is your past. Leave it there. Get on with the future part, honey

Never let the sadness of your past and the fear of your future ruin the happiness of your present.

I’m not thankful for being fucked over, I’m thankful for what I took from it. What I learned. What I taught myself in that particular moment. I'm grateful someone was able to take me there and let me be in that moment - not with them, but with myself. How my emotions could surrender to someone and make me feel everything I felt. It destroyed me, but I made my way through; and I look back years from, and I still love him, I do.

Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one's life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables ones to resuscitate dead recollections, but even then, there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable.

I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that's different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that's slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.

Only fools prefer the past!

The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.

Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.

Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely.

You can't change the things you've done. It's now and the here on out you've got control of.

Tonight his father had caught up, carrying all the horrors of hell with him. His mother could no longer protect him—hide him—and now his father‟s wrath would fall on him. He ran across the fields and through the forest, his bare feet carrying him as fast as they could go, aching and bleeding into the night. He could feel his father‟s eyes on him and his stinking breath filling Raven‟s nostrils as he rushed toward the only place he had ever found safe. He sobbed, choking on his grief and his frustration—the horrible guilt of carrying all the anger from his father into their house making him sick and afraid. He ran with lungs and muscles burning from strain, throwing himself through the doors of the castle when he reached them and only then chancing to look back the way he‟d come.

I live on in the sweetness of old dayswith strangers who build new dwellingson blue hills up to the edge of the sky,I talk softly with the captured treesand comfort them sometimes.How slowly time consumes the core of things,and soundlessly treads fate’s heavy heel.

At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point, you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life.

Tell me your past, my beloved, for a man is his past, and is to be known by it.

If, years later, I do use the slit detector to observe which way the electron went, it will mean that many years earlier the electron must have passed through one slit or the other. But if I don't use the "slit detector," then the electron must have passed through both slits. This is, of course, extremely weird. My actions at the beginning of the twenty-first century can change what happened thousands of years ago when the electron began its journey. It seems that just as there are multiple futures, there are also multiple pasts, and my acts of observation in the present can decide what happened in the past. As much as it challenges any hope of ever really knowing the future, quantum physics asks whether I can ever really know the past. It seems that the past is also in a superposition of possibilities that crystallize only once they are observed.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

What you had yesterday is only memories; what you will have tomorrow is your dreams and what you will do today, let it be love.

The past is far behind. If you still want to look at it, you will painfully stretch your neck muscles. Don't live in the past, leave the past, but learn from it.

Look, you can't change your past, Ditty, but you've still got your future.

Forget the Past. Doubt the Future. Love the Present.

The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.

How many stars can you count in the sky? How many mistakes can you count in your life? Stop counting! No clever man ever is stuck in the past!

If history really forever repeats itself: then, it has always been then.

And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind

The past is the occupational realm of historians—their daily work—and scholars have debated what their stance toward these social issues should be. As citizens and professionals, historians may naturally form a desire, as Carl Becker puts it, “to do work in the world.” That is, they might aspire to write history that is not only of scholarly value but also has a salutary impact in society. Becker defines the appropriate impact and the historian’s proper role as “correcting and rationalizing for common use Mr. Everyman’s mythological adaption of what actually happened.”That process is never simple, however, when the subject involves divisions so deep that they led to civil wars. One issue that inevitably leads to controversy is the extent to which history involves moral judgment. Another is the power of myths, exerting their influence on society and acting in opposition to the findings of historical research [190—91].