Past Quotes - Page 234

The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

When remedies are past, the griefs are ended By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended. To mourn a mischief that is past and gone Is the next way to draw new mischief on. What cannot be preserved when fortune takes, Patience her injury a mockery makes. The robb'd that smiles steals something for the thief; He robs himself that spends a bootless grief.

O, but they say, the tongues of dying men enforce attention, like deep harmony: where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain: for they breathe truth, that breathe their words in pain. he, that no more must say, is listened more than they whom youth and ease have taught to gloze; more are men's ends marked, than their lives before: the setting sun, and music at the close, as the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last; writ in rememberance more than things long past

We're very prepared: Infection-control people in hospitals over the past two months have been reviewing all their infection- control procedures because we anticipated just this sort of thing happening-a person coming from West Africa, they were healthy at the time they traveled, but got sick here.

It's past time to go when you start asking yourself if it's time to go.

The past in retrospect holds manifold disenchantments, failures and even tragedies; and yet the worse may be forgotten and the best held fast.

Throw away all ambition beyond that of doing the day's work well. The travelers on the road to success live in the present, heedless of taking thought for the morrow. Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your wildest ambition.

What differentiates time from space is that time does have a direction. In that sense it is different from space. I think that's certainly true that whereas spatial dimensions don't have direction or an arrow, time does. It runs from past to future. But I see that arrow of time as rooted in a deeper metaphysical reality, namely the reality of temporal becoming - of things coming to be and passing away. That is why time has this arrow. But it's not sufficient to simply say that time and space are distinct because time has a direction. The question will be: why does it have a direction?

The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.

No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural.

The country where he lives is haunted by the ghost of an old forest. In the cleared fields where he gardens and pastures his horses it stood once, and will return. There will be a resurrection of the wild. Already it stands in wait at the pasture fences.

If you're a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly that the conventional language is pretty much useless. It takes a long time to get past that, or it has taken me a long time. People in conventional Christianity have spoken lightly and sometimes frivolously of God for a long time. It's a word that needs to be used sparingly, in my opinion.

Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.

Let it be said that when given a chance to complete the liberation of black Americans, on June 23, 2003 five justices consigned them to another generation - or, perhaps, a term of indefinite duration - of virtual enslavement to the past.

The present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.

In the past the French came to Germany less with the desire to understand it than with a zealous desire to interpret, to analyze it dispassionately something for which their training at the Ecole Normale Superieure or the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the French language superbly equipped them to do.

A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.

In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.

The attempt to live that way, the attempt to treat everybody - it fails all the time - but the attempt to treat people as equals is a good attempt. It's a very good attempt. And there have been very few governments that have come anywhere near it in the past. The Greeks began to, the Romans began to - they both failed.

When the Soviet Union was dissolved, most of us didn't even have the feeling that the country was falling apart. We thought we would continue with our lives as in the past, but as good neighbors.

The absence of a peace treaty [with Japan] is an anachronism we inherited from the past and it must be removed. However, how to do this is a complicated issue.

At no time in the past, now or in the future has or will Russia take any part in actions aimed at overthrowing the legitimate government. I'm talking about something else right now - when someone does this, the outcome is very negative. Libya's state is disintegrated, Iraq's territory is flooded with terrorists, it looks like the scenario will be the same for Syria, and you know what the situation is in Afghanistan.

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.