Selected past quotes

1. It is also possible within this lifetime to enhance the power of the mind, enabling one to reaccess memories from previous lives. Such recollection tends to be more accessible during meditative experiences in the dream state. Once one has accessed memories of previous lives in the dream state, one gradually recalls them in the waking state.

2. Tell me not here, it needs not saying, What tune the enchantress plays In aftermaths of soft September Or under blanching mays, For she and I were long acquainted And I knew all her ways.

3. No matter how long we exist, we have our memories. Points in time which time itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems.

4. Keep some souvenirs of your past, or how will you ever prove it wasn't all a dream?

5. Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.

6. It's hard letting go of the past, when there are no firm handholds in the future.

7. Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.

8. There are new words now that excuse everybody. Give me the good old days of heroes and villains, the people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch.

9. You can never plan the future by the past.

10. A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.

11. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

12. The past is necessarily inferior to the future. That is how we wish it to be. How could we acknowledge any merit in our most dangerous enemy: the past, gloomy prevaricator, execrable tutor?

13. One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

14. Near the lake where drooped the willow, Long time ago!

15. Natural heart's ivy, Patience masks Our ruins of wrecked past purpose.

16. You see, I have no real complaints of how you've left your past behind I guess what gets me worried is you've erased him from your mind.

17. Remember when the music Came from wooden boxes strung with silver wire And as we sang the words, it would set our minds on fire, For we believed in things, and so we'd sing.

18. There are moments in history when brooding tragedy and its dark shadows can be lightened by recalling great moments of the past.

19. Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

20. We've uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business.

21. Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

22. We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

23. We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

24. I really thought that love would save us all.

25. I don't have any romanticism about any part of my past. I think of it only inasmuch as it gave me pleasure or helped me grow psychologically. That is the only thing that interests me about yesterday. I don't believe in yesterday, by the way. You know I don't believe in yesterday. I am only interested in what I am doing now.

26. How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

27. We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future.

28. People are always talking about the old days. They say that the old movies were better, that the old actors were so great. But I don't think so. All I can say about the old days is that they have passed.

29. Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

30. As of today, I have absolutely no regrets. I think I am a mature person who can take things in stride. I'm grateful for people in my past. They helped me get to where I am, wherever that is. But now, I am thinking for myself and sitting in on all the business transactions.

31. We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

32. The world is weary of the past, Oh, might it die or rest at last!

33. Till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!

34. Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.

35. What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can. But mostly I shall use the various tenses of the past. For mostly I do not know, it is perhaps no longer so, it is too soon to know, I simply do not know, perhaps shall never know.

36. I worked in Harrods as a sales girl and I was so lazy, I just sat on my arse all day. Now I have huge respect for shop girls. It was boring, so I tried to shoplift things, but we'd always get our bags checked.

37. The past was great no doubt, but I sincerely believe that the future will be more glorious still.

38. The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them.

39. In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

40. Ambition will take you And ride you too far and Conservatism bring you to boredom once more Sit down by the river And watch the stream flow Recall all the dreams That you once used to know The things you've forgotten That took you away To pastures not greener but meaner.

41. I long to talk with some old lover's ghost, Who died before the god of love was born.

42. That was the dark side of me and a pretty dismal time in my life. It's like someone you used to know and wonder why things looked so ugly from his perspective. (2004)

43. Pretty much any drug you can name, I've done it. (1988)

44. I wasn't the best kid in the world, but I wasn't an ax murderer, either. (1988)

45. We lived in a small house, and nobody argued in a whisper. We were exposed to [my parents'] violent outbursts against each other. That stuff sticks. (2004)

46. I was married when I was 20. It was a strong bond with someone but I can't necessarily say I was in love. (1995)

47. It's here on my arm. It was the kind of thing you do on the spur of the moment - Fuck it, lets do it. Then you break up, but it's still there: a girl's name on my arm. (2004)

48. Jack Reacher stayed alive, because he got cautious. He got cautious because he heard an echo from his past. He had a lot of past, and the echo was from the worst part of it.

49. Procuremos mas ser padres de nuestro porvenir que hijos de nuestro pasado.

50. O Memory! thou fond deceiver.

51. Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.

52. Usually quoted as: No man is rich enough to buy back his own past.

53. The whole day was strange, stunning, and it was a shattering experience. The past was disappearing, as if it had never belonged to me, as if I had read about it somewhere, as if I had dreamed about it, as if it was somebody else's story I have heard and somebody told it to me. I was becoming loose from my past, I was being uprooted from my history, I was losing my autobiography. I was becoming a non-being, what Buddha calls anatta. Boundaries were disappearing, distinctions were disappearing.

54. I've done a lot worse than jump off piers, son. Like throw a television out the window.

55. It took a lot of water to down just that fucking bat's head, let me tell you. It's still stuck in my fucking throat, after all these years. People all over the world say, 'You're the guy who kills creatures? You still do it? You do it every night?' It happened fucking once, for Christ's sake.

56. Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'.(quoting John Greenleaf Whittier)

57. I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast.

58. Our politics are our deepest form of expression: they mirror our past experiences and reflect our dreams and aspirations for the future.

59. One faces the future with one's past.

60. The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

61. And nothing to look backward to with pride, And nothing to look forward to with hope.

62. Who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

63. The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.

64. You couldn't get hold of the things you'd done and turn them right again. Such a power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to women and men, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.

65. He was the future, once...

66. There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbe de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.

67. Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.

68. I remember being in seventh grade and I was one of the kids that was considered a burnout. I had the most intense crush on this very popular girl. I pined for this girl, like beyond Romeo and Juliet. Shocking. I just chewed my tongue up for her. Eighth grade comes along, we hang out a little at those parties where you end up making out. So we did that and I just couldn't have been happier. Then she goes for the football guy, and leaves me just dangling in the breeze. Years later, after I dropped out of high school. I'm playing a club. I'm on stage and I look out and I'm like, 'Fuck, it's her!' So I finish the set and I go directly to the bar where she's sitting and I walk up to her and it's that face, man - incredible. And I went, 'It's so nice to see you!' And I look at her and she's 250 pounds! She is mammoth! She's as wide as this table, but her face is still the same. And I went, 'Oh my, nice to see you - how many kids do you have?' And she had four kids. And I thought, 'What fitting payback for fucking breaking my heart when I was a little kid.' (1995)

69. I do not ordinarily make prophecies, but about this I am absolutely prophetic: the coming hundred years are going to be more and more irrational, and more and more mystical. The second thing: After a hundred years people will be perfectly able to understand why I was misunderstood - because I am the beginning of the mystical, the irrational. I am a discontinuity with the past. The past cannot understand me; only the future will understand. The past can only condemn me. It cannot understand me, it cannot answer me, it cannot argue with me; it can only condemn me. Only the future : as man becomes more and more available to the mysterious, to the meaningless yet significant : After a hundred years they will understand. Because the more man becomes aware of the mysterious side of life, the less he is political; the less he is a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian; the less is the possibility for his being a fanatic. A man in tune with the mysterious is humble, loving, caring, accepting the uniqueness of everybody. He is rejoicing in the freedom of each individual, because only with freedom can this garden of humanity be a rich place.

70. We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible. There have been war, plague, scandal, and treason, and there is no way of our preventing their having taken place; the executioner became an executioner and the victim underwent his fate as a victim without us; all that we can do is to reveal it, to integrate it into the human heritage, to raise it to the dignity of the aesthetic existence which bears within itself its finality; but first this history had to occur: it occurred as scandal, revolt, crime, or sacrifice, and we were able to try to save it only because it first offered us a form. Today must also exist before being confirmed in its existence: its destination in such a way that everything about it already seemed justified and that there was no more of it to reject, then there would also be nothing to say about it, for no form would take shape in it; it is revealed only through rejection, desire, hate and love. In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men. But at the heart of his existence he finds the exigency which is common to all men; he must first will freedom within himself and universally; he must try to conquer it: in the light of this project situations are graded and reasons for acting are made manifest.