Past Quotes - Page 125

Even though you've given up a past it hasn't given you up. It comes uninvited - and sometimes half welcome.

Our past can control today and tomorrow only to the degree we allow it. The past should not be a place where we dwell but a place from which we learn all we can and then move on.

Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today's television or games - much less the internet - than you did a few decades ago.

Feelings are only your history being occasioned by the present moment. If that's your enemy, then your history is your enemy. If sensations are your enemy, your body is your enemy. And if memory is your enemy, you'd better have a way of controlling your mind in such a way that you never are reminded of things that are painful from the past. If you avoid people, avoid having your buttons pushed, avoid going to places that might occasion anxiety; if you're hammering down drugs and alcohol; these are all methods of trying to mount that unhealthy agenda.

I have . . . a deep concern with the development of a literature worthy of our past, and of our destiny; without which literature certainly, we can never come to much. I have a deep concern with the development of an audience worthy of such a literature.

The first principle of contract negotiations is don't remind them of what you did in the past - tell them what you're going to do in the future.

Do not belong to the past dawns,but to the noons of future

When one past thought has ceased and a future thought has not yet risen, in that gap, in between, isn't there a consciousness of the present moment; fresh, virgin, unaltered by even a hair's breadth of a concept, a luminous, naked awareness? Well, that's what naturally peaceful awareness is.

Visiting old haunts is hard on memory. Things shrink, change, and disappear.

If it had taught them nothing else, twenty years of living past high school had taught them self-preservation. ... No one was going to risk putting his ego on the line; they would come prepared with dates, flattering clothes, and a well-rehearsed, carefully edited biography. They would all be kind to each other. High school was enough torture for one lifetime.

Scientifically, I know beginnings don’t exist. The world is made of energy, which is neither created nor destroyed. Everything she is was here before me. Everything she was will remain. Her existence touches both my past and my future at one point—infinity. Lifelines aren’t lines at all. They’re more like circles. It’s safe to start anywhere and the story will curve its way back to the starting point. Eventually. In other words, it doesn’t matter where I begin. It doesn’t change the end.

When a relationship dies do we ever really give up the ghost or are we forever haunted by the spirits of relationships past?

Two significant developments in the past several decades have been the collapse of communism as an ideology and the general acceptance, in rhetoric, if not practice, of liberal democracy.

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.

There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past.

Don't allow missed opportunities of the past interfere with the opportunities that are right before you.

While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.

Thus, human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of the kind that could not have happened in the past...Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.

Every event has a purpose and every setback a lesson. Failure is essential to personal expansion. It brings inner growth and a whole host of psychic rewards. Never regret your past. Rather embrace it as the teacher it is.

Ka is a wheel; its one purpose is to turn. The spin of ka always brings us back to the same place, to face and reface our mistakes and defeats until we can learn from them. When we learn from the past, the wheel continues to move forward, towards growth and evolution. When we don’t, the wheel spins backward, and we are given another chance. If once more we squander the opportunity, the wheel continues its rotation towards devolution, or destruction.

My message to the serious programmer is this: spend a part of your working day examining and refining your own methods. Even though programmers are always struggling to meet some future or past deadline, methodological abstraction is a wise long term investment.

I think the French have come to grips with their past, and that was true up until about - until the '70s. And then there were things like the film "The Sorrow And The Pity."

When you change your NOW story, you instantly change your past story and your future story.

I wouldn't want to see anything irreparable happen, but I also like it when seemingly irreparable thing occur and men and women find a way to move past it.

I always remember that whatever I have done in the past or may do in the future, Duke University is responsible in one way or another.