Past Quotes - Page 197

If men had known how to permeate the soul with mathematics in the right way in the arithmetic lessons during these past years, we should not now have Bolshevism in Eastern Europe.

In the past ABC has made half-hearted efforts or, worse, cosmetic efforts, to do something about news and I wasn't certain about what their real aim was - nor am I now.

If we've learned any lessons during the past few decades, perhaps the most important is that preservation of our environment is not a partisan challenge; it's common sense. Our physical health, our social happiness, and our economic well-being will be sustained only by all of us working in partnership as thoughtful, effective stewards of our natural resources.

I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future.

One of the reasons why old people make so many journeys into the past is to satisfy themselves that it is still there.

I have basset hounds. I have four now, I've had more in the past, and I relate to them because physically we're similar, in that they have very short legs and kind of long torsos, and I do as well.

Mutual fund managers are trapped in this rather deadly vicious circle: the more successful they are, the more money flows into their mutual fund. Then, it is more difficult for them to beat the market averages or even to match their own past performance.

I never really worried about those hurdles. They were just standing there, and I was always zooming past them just to get back on the ground again.

I have never known a cat that couldn't quiet me down just by walking slowly past my chair.

When I had money in the past, I would always travel rather than spend it on big apartments or cars. And I still feel exactly the same way.

I believed that by fixing it down in words, I could force sense from all that had happened, that effect would follow cause, and the reason for each event come clear to me. But then I returned one day, to find all my careful scribing gone to fragments of vellum lying in a trampled yard with wet snow blowing over them. I sat my horse, looking down at them, and knew that, as it always would, the past had broken free of my effort to define and understand it. History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries.

Art is an evolution of techniques and materials from past to present and we can't stop learning.

It is my belief that it is not the fact that he traveled as much as he did during the past few months as much as what he said and how he said it that hurt him.

This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from the other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principal.

Catch up with your past, before it catches up with you.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.

If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotized by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change.

Praise they that will times past, I joy to see My selfe now live: this age best pleaseth mee.

All the past up to a moment ago is your legacy. You have a right to it.

You can never get rid of all of your fears. Some are necessary and a part of life. But most of our fears are illusory, based on risks or threats that exist only in our minds. Such fears constrain and make you miserable. The feeling of moving past a particular fear is one of liberation and freedom.

The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.

To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present.

Among the current discussions, the impact of new and sophisticated methods in the study of the past occupies an important place. The new 'scientific' or 'cliometric' history-born of the marriage contracted between historical problems and advanced statistical analysis, with economic theory as bridesmaid and the computer as best man-has made tremendous advances in the last generation.