Past Quotes - Page 217

Throughout the world today there is a gowing awareness of the failings of the Western model of development and a corresponding desire to look for more human-scale, ecological ways of living. If Ladakh now succeeds in creating for itself a future which retains the foundations of its traditional past, it will be an inspiring example of how all the various elements of an ecological future fit together.

All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.

The successful publishing house is the one that can guess ahead, not the one that imitates the past.

I always return to Paris, taking my selves along - past self, customary self, the self I never had.

Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.

Not only can no one predict the future, we don't understand the present - and there isn't even any certainty about the past.

Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked.

Even after the greatest defeats, the depressing thought of being a failure is best combated by taking stock of all your past achievements.

There are always signs that a reign is ending, and they are usually spotted not in the king himself but in his court. In the inner circle, latent jealousies between advisers spill into open conflict, as they angrily debate who is to blame for the calamity, chewing over each other's past errors and pointing the finger at old and nascent enemies.

The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.

Have no age, transcend both past and future, and enter into the eternal present.

For most of history, war has been a more or less functional institution, providing benefits for those societies that were good at it, although the cost in money, in lives, and in suffering was always significant. Only in the past century have large numbers of people begun to question the basic assumption of civilized societies that war is inevitable and often useful.

It seems to me... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.

So this anchoring in some way, in some important way in the past without repeating the past, but on the basis of the past building something new: that is what is important.

In years past, to keep their men close, women would wear a ring and bear children. It doesn't work like that today. Nowadays, how do we hold on to those we love? I've no idea.

If a man lived long enough, his past would always overtake him, no matter how fast he ran or how morally he tried to live subsequently. And how men dealt with that law ultimately revealed their true natures.

You look at your past and things that are unresolved and figure out what you need to do to move forward and fill a role with your family and in your community.

I'm rather pleased with the new manuals. I see Inform now as a gauche young adult, having got past the stage of growing out of his shoes every few months.

One can't deny what has happened to us in the past. The secret is to enjoy and be proud of the music we've created and the people with whom we have been linked. It's all a long chain of involvement in the world, and we are proud to be yet another link in this chain.

The past is never completely lost, however extensive the devastation. Your sorrows are the bricks and mortar of a magnificent temple. What you are today and what you will be tomorrow are because of what you have been.

I spent the first 18 years of my life in the pastoral town of Vernal, Utah, in the shadows of the Book Cliffs and the Uinta Mountains.

While women certainly have made great strides toward pay parity in the past 30 years, there is still a gap in earnings between men and women in equivalent professions.