The Past Quotes - Page 2

It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).

When you live in the present, the past is forgotten & the future takes care of itself.

Some of our friends are our friends only because we used to be friends.

The past ignorance has great lessons for us in our present day. Until we take real lessons from the past ignorance which led us into our present situation, we shall always see shadows of the past in the present.

Remembering something from the past? you are creating it right now as evidence for who you are now.

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

You’re everything to me. But at best, I’m just a memory to you.

It didn’t hurt me. Not “hurt”. Hurt is a four letter word. It’s short, almost cute sounding. Aawwww, did that hurt? No. It didn’t hurt. Destroyed, Obliterated, Desecrated, Annihilated, Demolished, Shattered, or Demoralised maybe… But no. It didn’t hurt me. It didn’t “hurt” me at all.

There exist no new mistakes anywhere. The same mistakes people committed are the same mistakes people are committing and the same mistakes shall people commit

If you want to know if someone was meant to be in your future, then remove all the worldly things about them from your mind. Don’t think about their looks, the intimate moments or their personality. Now, think about how they made you feel, how they improved your life and what virtues they possess that push you to want to become better. Did they bring you closer to God? Did they bring you to your life mission? Did they ever lie to you, betray you or made it impossible for you to feel comfortable speaking your mind? When you remove all the shine from a diamond, it becomes a glass rock. What value is it then? See beneath the surface and you will know who your future is with.

The past gave us experience and made us wiser so that we can create a beautiful and brighter future.

I thought about how the past can become so small. An entire day, 24 separate, heavy hours, becomes the size of a tiny brown leaf falling from a tree. Before you know it, a whole year is just a pile of dead leaves on the ground. The year or so I’d spent in love with Chad was starting to feel so long ago, swept away by the wind. I knew that this year would soon feel far away too.

I now know how your angercame from skeletonsthat rattled in your heartand you couldn't escape them.

To strengthen the connection between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind is to gain access to a map and compass to help you move towards your dream. To gain access to the subconscious mind is to gain the ability to see and create the future, the ability to shift the present, and the ability to alter your own perceptions of the past.

He was both everything I could ever want…And nothing I could ever have…

Every quote, every book, every film seemed to suggest that ‘one day’ someone would come into my life and love me with an intensity and a passion I had never experienced before. And to their credit they were right; It all came and went so fast it really did feel as if it were just ‘one day’....

History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.

It's only awkward if it matters.

When you’re in love with two people, always choose the second. The fact that you are constantly thinking of the second person makes it obvious that the first will never fulfill you, unless the second person did not fulfill you either. At this point, you have to choose the third person because God is getting a little tired of your inattention and indecisiveness, and is planning on sending a fourth person into your life just to slap you around with the bible for not entering the promised land.

I’d never dreamed anybody could love me the way he did. And even when he proved it to me time and again – I still could hardly believe it was true.

You can miss places. You can miss people.Just know that what you’re really missing is the way things were. And even if you could go there again…. see them again…. you can’t go back.They’re not the same.You’re not the same.The loss of them changed you.

God has a way of picking a “nobody” and turning their world upside down, in order to create a “somebody” that will remove the obstacles they encountered out of the pathway for others.

Your memory feels like home to me.So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

In history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost . . . especially against the narrow and futile patriotism, which, instead of pressing forward in pursuit of truth, takes pride in walking backwards to cover the slightest nakedness of our forefathers.

We cannot change the past, she thought. How we long to sometimes, trying to work out how horror might have been averted by a fluke of fortune, a kind intercession, wisdom not yet granted.

I had forgotten, I suppose, that there were bright memories in amongst the dark.

The day history will die and lose its essence with time, memories will not only die, but they shall also surely be forgotten with time!

But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been.

The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.

Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret.

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

The present is an eternal attempt to separate the past from the future.

We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.

With you in my life I felt like I could conquer anything.It was as if I was on top of the world and even the stars themselves were just within my grasp.But without you …. even getting through the day is hard.

if you will not always think about the decisions you are taking, you shall always think about the decisions you should have taken in regret, in wonder or in joy. Regrets of the past shall always remain an indelible footprint but the lessons from regrets can always be learned and be used

The log on the fire: is it dreaming of the forest?

Some people masturbate to temporarily replace their partners when they are absent, whereas some people do that to temporarily live in the present.

Holding on to negative feelings and past circumstances is like placing a lock on your soul.

We are always fascinated with the past, but the future is always brighter.

Every person with ADHD already knows that destination addiction is part of their disorder. However, if it doesn’t have a positive outlet, it can destroy your life. It is not another person that will make your life better; it is the qualities in them that you admire. Incorporate those attributes into your own life and you won’t miss a thing.

I was yours once till death if you cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now--I can't hang about whining for ever--and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked and attend to your own happiness?

Happiness is like good health: when you have it, you don’t notice it. But as the years go by, oh, the memories, the memories of happiness past!

Rehashing the past wouldn't change anything. Time to move forward.

My father taught me that you can you read a hundred books on wisdom and write a hundred books on wisdom, but unless you apply what you learned then its only words on a page. Life is not lived with intentions, but action.

Where exactly does it come from, I’d like to know, this ineradicable attitude of superiority toward the past? This stubbornly dumb, can’t-kill-it-with-an-ax conviction that we, the now, critically and categorically know better than they, the past. Is it from the mere fact that their future is known to us, that we know what happens? (Nothing good.) It’s much the way we treat small children— pedantic and permissive at the same time. And we always think of the people of the past — just as we do of children — as being naïve in everything from their clothes and hairstyles to their thoughts and feelings.

Don’t be ruled by your past. Don’t be crippled by the past. Let the past be the past and focus on what is ahead. Remember however that if you neglect the most essential lessons of the past, you shall walk into the future with one leg.

You can't judge the present by the past. Each day is different, and you live it differently.

Sometimes it's more painful to draw to mind the good times

...before you, life was desolate - the past hardly worth remembering - and now, each moment a keepsake I can't throw away ...

Insecure people often falsify the past, in order to make the future pure.

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

Don’t ever let your spouse or partner blame an outside person or persons for the ruin of your relationship or their past relationships. If two people are committed to one another then no one can change that.

For you are you, and I am I, and once we were we… but as long as I exist and so do you – know that I will always love you.

MOTHER TIME: Life goes by so very fast, my dears, and taking the time to reflect, even once a year, slows things down. We zoom past so many seconds, minutes, hours, killing them with the frantic way we live that it's important we take at least this one collective sigh and stop, take stock, and acknowledge our place in time before diving back into the melee. Midnight on New Year's Eve is a unique kind of magic where, just for a moment, the past and the future exist at once in the present. Whether we're aware of it or not, as we countdown together to it, we're sharing the burden of our history and committing to the promise of tomorrow.

WE COMMENTED TO Corrie about the practicalness of the things she recalled, how her memories seemed to throw a spotlight on problems and decisions we faced here and now. "But," she said, "this is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.

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.

You NEED to look back to remember the awesome memories, to remember the positive lessons you have learned, to help someone else learn from what you have lived and to see how far you have come.

If you never tell anyone the truth about yourself, eventually you start to forget. The love, the heartbreak, the joy, the despair, the things I did that were good, the things I did that were shameful--if I kept them all inside, my memories of them would start to disappear. And then I would disappear.

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seem like artifacts from a long-lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass.