210 Past Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

I really thought that love would save us all.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The best of prophets of the future is the past.

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.

Do not look back upon what has been done. Go ahead!

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

And the things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget that history puts a saint in every dream.

All history is modern history.

Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

My country or the stars Or my youth, what's farthest?

'Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours, And ask them what report they bore to heaven.

Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o'clock. When he was in his room and had closed the door tight he stood by it for a moment, his thin limbs trembling. He knew now that he had always been a fool. 'O Russet Witch!' But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.

No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison - a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald. And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine; the true music; the true splash of the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires, acting - or, no, not acting - sitting here and there unanimously, isn't that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

I think we all agree, the past is over.

We ought not to look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dear-bought experience.

I know that Europe's wonderful, yet something seems to lack; The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.

Weep no more, nor sigh, nor groan, Sorrow calls no time that's gone; Violets plucked, the sweetest rain Makes not fresh nor grow again.

You are your own forerunner, and the towers you have builded are but the foundation of your giant-self. And that self too shall be a foundation. And I too am my own forerunner, for the long shadow stretching before me at sunrise shall gather under my feet at the noon hour. Yet another sunrise shall lay another shadow before me, and that also shall be gathered at another noon. Always have we been our own forerunners, and always shall we be. And all that we have gathered and shall gather shall be but seeds for fields yet unploughed. We are the fields and the ploughmen, the gatherers and the gathered.

7) Any damn fool can predict the past.

I do not believe in recovery. The past with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.

She was a young person whose reveries never were in retrospect. For her past was no treasury of distinct memories, all hoarded and classified, some brighter than others and more highly valued. All memories were for her but as notes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of her future.

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.

While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it we do suddenly realize - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been.

We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.

Krapp: Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.

And no I can't find no reason to explain the way that I feel. I remember things being more clearer, at one time things were more real.

In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.

We're all so clogged with dead ideas passed from generation to generation that even the best of us don't know the way out We invented the Revolution but we don't know how to run it Look everyone wants to keep something from the past a souvenir of the old regime This man decides to keep a painting This one keeps his mistress He [pointing] keeps his garden He [pointing] keeps his estate He keeps his country house He keeps his factories This man couldn't part with his shipyards This one kept his army and that one keeps his king

He who rejects the entire past, without keeping any part of it which could serve to breathe life into the revolution, condemns himself to finding justification only in the future and, in the meantime, to entrusting the police with the task of justifying the provisional state of affairs... The future is the only transcendental value for men without God.

I am part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move.

I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds, Sniff them and think and sniff again and try Once more to think what it is I am remembering, Always in vain. I cannot like the scent, Yet I would rather give up others more sweet, With no meaning, than this bitter one.

Forgotten is forgiven.

A year ago my approval rating was in the 30s, my nominee for the Supreme Court had just withdrawn, and my vice president had shot someone. Ah, those were the good ol' days.

I was very cruel to actors and to other people. I think I was a very, very unpleasant young man. If I met the young Ingmar today, I think I would say, 'You are very talented and I will see if I can help you, but I don't think I want anything else to do with you.' I don't say I'm pleasant now, but I think I changed slowly in my 50's. At least I hope I've changed.

Actions o' th' last age are like almanacks o' th' last year.

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom.

I fear I'll do some damage One fine day But I would not be convicted By a jury of my peers Still crazy Still crazy Still crazy after all these years.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past,-so good night!

For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.- I cannot paint What then I was.

Thou who stealest fire, From the fountains of the past, To glorify the present; oh, haste, Visit my low desire! Strengthen me, enlighten me! I faint in this obscurity, Thou dewy dawn of memory.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the underworld, Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love below the verge; So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

We've all done things we shouldn't, it's just I did stuff at college, when nobody knew about it, so I'm not a saint. ... I wasted time doing self-destructive things but it didn't work. I found out you can only dance on so many tabletops. I got that all out of my system and now I'm healthy and I'm grounded.

You expect to break me? Impossible! You broke me years ago. You killed me years ago...

Oh god, that was like f--king 1112 years ago. Do you miss it?

One of us sings in the street, and we listen to him; The words ring over us like vague bells of sorrow. He sings of a house he lived in long ago. It is strange; this house of dust was the house I lived in; The house you lived in, the house that all of us know.

And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness, Vaguely and incoherently, some dream Of a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills . . . A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam; Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills.

Chad I slept with Katie too.

Perhaps he will not return. But what we have lived comes back to us. We see more. We feel, as our rings increase, something that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest leaf-tips further.

'I have been here before,' I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.

What they had me doing first was autographing copies of Come and Get It at the Bon Marche, where I had been fired a couple of years back. That was bad enough but think of me autographing a book written by somebody else. That took crust but it didn't turn out so badly because when I got to the store, about twenty people finally strolled in and looked at me from a distance and kept their buying firmly in control. What the Goldwyn people had forgotten was that up that way I'm still remembered as the freak from West Seattle High.

Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last! Loitering slow, the Future creepeth - Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth - And motionless forever stands the Past.

Ich wei?, wo ich herkomme, also wei? ich auch, wo ich hingehore.

As she listened to him, Madame Bovary marveled at how old she was: all those re-emerging details made her life seem vaster as though she had endless emotional experiences to look back on.

I was obviously floating in the atmosphere; companioned not only by the strange child and the radiant pair, but by a constantly increasing throng of half-luminous, vine-crowned youths and maidens with wind-blown hair and joyful countenance. We slowly ascended together, as if borne on a fragrant breeze which blew not from the earth but from the golden nebulae, and the child whispered in my ear that I must look always upward to the pathways of light, and never backward to the sphere I had just left.

And she walked away in silence, It's strange, how you never know, But we'd both gotten what we'd asked for, Such a long, long time ago.

You see, ten years ago it was the front seat Drivin' stoned and feelin' no pain. Now here I am straight and sittin' in the back Hitting Sixteen Parkside Lane.

'Didn't this used to be our dining-room table back at Sutherland Street, Frank?' said Kathleen.

The future cannot come, for when it comes it's already past.

The poor old Past, The Future's slave, She drudged through pain and crime To bring about the blissful Prime, Then-perished. There's a grave!