Past Quotes - Page 241

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

The more innocuous the name of a weapon, the more hideous its impact. Some of the most horrific weapons of the Vietnam era were named Bambi, Infant, Daisycutter, Grasshopper, and Agent Orange. Nor is the trend new: From the past we have Mustard Gas, Angel Chasers [two can-nonballs linked with a chain for added destruction], and the Peacemaker, to name a few.)

There is nothing that could be revealed about a pastor that has not already been covered by the blood of Jesus

Great champions learn from past experiences, whether those be good or bad. A lot of times a guy needs to be knocked down before he gets up and fights.

I expect we are all jealous of the women in their past, but how much less exciting if the women had not kept the bed warm.

My business is retrospective = I'm looking at the past, they all passed away - and it's a big pleasure, that's the point of collecting. It's certainly a [better] quality of life you have living with [these] works, but [I] also [value] the relationship we have with the artists.

I think we like to romanticise about past eras, and for sure there have been great ones (like the 1820s maybe, or the 1530s) but I don't think London has ever been more culturally and sartorially rich as it is now.

They were not friends. They didn't know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear.

That was a frustrating race for me. I pushed as hard as possible at the start on the medium tyres whilst everyone around me was on the grippier soft compound rubber. Once I moved to the soft tyres I was able to set the race's then fastest lap so things looked good with our strategy. Unfortunately the engine anti-kill triggered when I came in to make my final pit stop which cost me a lot of time. It's frustrating as we should have finished strongly. My focus is now Barcelona where I've delivered very strongly in the past.

The past isn't fixed and frozen in place. Instead, its meaning changes as life unfolds.

The earth doesn't have a housekeeper to do the dusting. And the dust that falls on it every day remains there. Everything that's come down to us from the past has been conserved by dust.

When I paint I feel that all the artists of the past are behind me.

I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.

Time is a stream which glides smoothly on and is past before we know.

Twice does he live who can enjoy the remembrance of the past.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

You can succeed beyond the past, but not beyond your belief

The fall of Rome is often regarded as an object lesson in the wages of sin. Its contemporaries, however, more frequently laid the blame on the rise of Christianity. . . . Although they do not inquire into the future, and either forget or do not know the past, yet defame present times as most unusually beset, as it were, by evils because there is belief in Christ and worship of God, and increasingly less worship of idols.

And before long , the msuic , the views rushing past the window , my fathers voice and the narrow cobblestone streets all merged into one , and it seemed to me that while we would never find answers to these fundamental questions , it was good for us to ask them anyway . pg. 284

I've been offered quite a few network shows, over the past couple of years, and always turned them down because I never wanted the commitment. The way that it works in America, you do a pilot and then you wait, and I just thought that wasn't really what I was interested in doing, in that moment.

Barcelona is now in the past. I was sick and boxed in, and that's understandable why I lost.

Paul McCartney, one of the best songwriters of all time, has only produced manure for the past 25 years.

Hamas must agree to first recognize Israel, second to end all violence, third to accept past agreements. Try to find a mention of the fact that the United States and Israel reject all three of those. They obviously don't recognize Palestine, they certainly don't withdraw the use of violence or the threat of it - in fact they insist on it - and they don't accept past agreements, including the road map.

You never really saw the racism in Europe in the past because it was so homogeneous. When everyone is blonde and blue-eyed, you don't see racism. But as soon as there was the beginnings of immigration, it just came out very dramatically.

I am particularly conscious of my connection to the poets of the Harlem Renaissance because I, too, am a Black poet, born into, and shaped by, the very community in which those poets of the past produced so much of the work we associate with the Harlem Renaissance. We speak from the same place, both literally and metaphorically.