Past Quotes - Page 153

Nostalgia keeps dissolving the ironic narratives in which I have contained my past.

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

Learn the lesson of your own pain--learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul--in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love.

I confessed recently to an old friend, "I realized I was looking at you, in your visit, through old glasses. Speaking old words. Telling old stories. I realize that in my life I've made so many physical changes and I need to give my spirit time to catch up." Time for my spirit to look at my friend through the new glasses of current life experiences. Old friends are precious. They become even more treasured when they are wrapped in the currentness of life experiences and not relegated to the past in which they once lived.

I know I can't change the past. Not my mistakes or the mistakes of others. But I can begin by changing me.

You can't live in the past, there's nothing you can do about it.

The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future.

Cosmology does, I think, affect the way that we perceive humanity's role in nature. One thing we've learnt from astronomy is that the future lying ahead is more prolonged than the past. Even our sun is less than halfway through its life.

The virtue of Yankee upbringing spiritually speaking is of more downright value to me than any past heritages.

For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment

The mental game of business is understanding this Paradox: the better you think you are doing, the greater should be your cause for concern: the more self-satisfied you are with your accomplishments, your past achievements, your 'right moves', the less you should be.

How the holy and the profane mix in the light of day and at the end of life is sometimes the most beautiful thing in this world and a compassionate entry into the next. After failure and defeat, a concentration upon certain beauties, though forever lost and unretrievable, can lift the wounded past roundedness and the dying past dying, protecting them with an image, still and bright, that will ride with them on their long ride, never to fade and never to retreat.

Our past is a story existing only in our minds. Look, analyze, understand, and forgive. Then, as quickly as possible, chuck it.

Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it.

If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory." Translation by David Downie

Somehow, we have to get older people back close to growing children if we are to restore a sense of community, acquire knowledge of the past, and provide a sense of the future.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

There is pleasure in calm remembrance of a past sorrow.

How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time, the past and the future, in which all things disappear.

The great task of statesmanship is to apply past lessons to new situations, to draw correct analogies to understand and act upon present forces, to recognise the need for change.

All we have to face in the future is what has happened in the past. It is unbearable.

After much soul searching I was able to renounce my past Islamist ideology, challenging everything I was once prepared to die for.

To have any kind of a future you've got to give up hope of ever changing your past.

History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations.