Past Quotes - Page 235

Where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.

The power of the present moment is so immense it is capable - when lived in fully - of destroying forever every past mistake and regret.

Human relations tend to be more difficult when you're dealing with someone who weighs 30 kilograms more than you do. That's when you worry about whether a well-meaning gesture could produce complications. We have no problems with countries like Madagascar or Bolivia, for example. But Germany is our neighbor and we have a shared past. Besides, Germany is powerful and ambitious and more than four times as large as we are. It makes complete sense that we would act cautiously. It's simply Realpolitik.

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

A friend is someone who understand your past, believes in your future, and accepts you today just the way you are.

There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.

you cannot let the pain of the past destroy the happiness of the future.

Your imagination is ten times more potent than your willpower. Unleashed, it provides a sense of certainty and tenacious vision that goes far beyond any limitation of the past.

The Republican party must break with its long-established instinct for caution and make a bold stand for first principles of freedom and constitutional limitations on government - from full repeal of Obamacare to rolling back multitrillion-dollar deficits. This is not so much a reproach of past Republican conduct as it is a recognition of new opportunities.

I think, there is a possibility - I would say it's more than that - that we will come to a view of foreign policy going forward that learns from the past but doesn't get captured by it.

It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.

I like to relax and lie in the water. It is the way I calm myself down. But every time I walk past my bathroom, I go in and I put on some perfume. I use different perfumes for different moods. If I feel that I need to calm down, I put on certain fragrances that are more sensual. If I feel that I need to energize, I put on something else. Fragrance for me is so important.

We are runaway slaves from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them.

Australia was once a leader in taking global warming seriously. The former PM [Kevin Rudd] called it 'greatest moral challenge of our time'. But in the past couple of years the national consensus has been eroded and Australians are being encouraged by the polluters and their mates in Parliament to forget it was ever mentioned. It's heartbreaking.

I try to give as much blanket forgiveness as much as possible in my life because that's the only way you can get past things and move forward. But, conversely, I'd like to be forgiven. In many ways, that's the bigger leap, the bigger transformation and the bigger step forward.

This is not my phrase, but if you're stuck in the past, then you're depressed. If you're stuck in the future, then you're anxious.

I thought I wanted the truth, but I don't. The past is the past and it can't be changed. It's the future I'm interested in." -Gabriel McGregor

There is, however, no advantage in reflections on the past further than may be of service to the present. For the future we must provide by maintaining what the present gives us and redoubling our efforts; it is hereditary to us to win virtue as the fruit of labour, and you must not change the habit, even though you should have a slight advantage in wealth and resources; for it is not right that what was won in want should be lost in plenty.

On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being.

Let us not only remember the past and its required sacrifice, let us also remember that we are responsible to build a legacy for the generations which follow us.

The experienced pastor will recognize to which situation humor belongs and to which belongs sobriety.

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us.

Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.