Past Quotes - Page 191

To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly.

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

All the past we leave behind; We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O Pioneers!

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

It is hard to compare the eras, but Joe Jackson and Ty Cobb from the past, Sandy Koufax and Roger Clements from the present.

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.

Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

I am always surprised when I watch the weather report on German television. First they show the map of Europe and then the camera moves to the right. Then comes Kiev, then Moscow and then everything stops. This seems to be the West's view of us - of a wild Russia that begins past Moscow, a place one prefers not to see. This is a big mistake. The West must pay closer attention.

I guess I can call myself a pragmatist with a conservative perspective. It would be hard for me to explain this, but I always take realities of today, lessons from the distant and recent past into consideration.

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.

I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.

No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.

For women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places.

The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community - these are the most vital things that education must try to produce.

Future is not extrapolation of past

When I came back, I wasn't looking past this year. This is a bonus for me. I just wish it would have turned out a little better, but we all don't get what we want all the time.

Usually, to be sure, man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being.

We often live in the past a lot more than we probably realize.

The good, the bad, that's just life. Let it go. There's no need to fret about the past. The question is: who are you going to share it with tomorrow?

There is no end to the deceits of the past.

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.