Past Quotes - Page 257

And each year now we know more, but we know no better — what we see in the sky is simply the softened gloss of the past sifting back to us, and likewise, every atom down the body’s shining length was inside a star, and will be again.

Truth comes to us from the past, as gold is washed down from the mountains of Sierra Nevada, in minute but precious particles, and intermixed with infinite alloy, the debris of the centuries.

You can open to the idea that whatever happened to you in the past eventually turned out or will turn out to be a benefit to you.

You can be happy if you are willing to let go of your past and leave yourself unencumbered so you can fly freely.

When I say I hate nostalgia, I hate things set in the recent past where everything is shiny and new.

And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.

The rural areas have been deprived by the cities in the past. Development resources and energy should be directed where the people live.

I cannot take back one word or action; the past does not change for anyone.

No one can master the past; one can only interrogate it.

My philosophy, one of the biggest enemies of future success is past success, because you become complacent, you become risk averse, and that's one of the things we try to drive here, and this is fundamental to this philosophy, and that's in this component change, and also in value creation. That we need to drive creative destruction, not just incremental innovations, but innovations that will change the whole nature of the business.

And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life. Certainly neither she nor Inman were the people they had been the last time they were together. And she believed maybe she liked them both better now.

As I said just now, the world has gone past me. I don't blame it; but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same. Seven-eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again.

The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.

Most people don't have any association in their minds with what they do and with ethics. They think they somehow moved past the questions of morality or values or ethics, and that's something that I've never imagined to be true.

The coldest growing seasons of the future [will be] hotter than the hottest of the past. Is agriculture adapted to that? I don't know. Can fish play the piano?

Oh, there at last, life's trials past, / We'll meet our loved ones more, / Whose feet have trod the path to God, -- / Not lost, but gone before.

Children who remember their past lives offer the most compelling evidence yet for reincarnation... when adults listen-really listen-to what the children are trying to say, their own understanding of spirit and of children are changed forever.

Most writers in Mexico have had posts as ambassadors, secretaries - that is no longer the case. Now a writer can live off writing. He has an audience: there are publishing houses, there are newspapers - so the situation is not as terrible as it used to be when there were no means and he had to go into government service, be an ambassador or a cabinet minister, etc. So, things are changing in the sense that the civil society is now the protagonist. The writer therefore occupies a different position, but no less influential than in the past, in a new, democratic society.

Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don't get past the third paragraph you've wasted your energy and valuable ink.

Whatever happened in the past doesn't really matter anymore to us right now.

It is not simply what one remembers, but why. There are sites of amputation where the past is severed from the body of the present. Remembering only encourages the growth of phantom limbs. And it is not simply what one remembers, or why, but what to do with what one remembers, which of the scattered pieces to carry forward, what to protect and preserve, what to leave behind.

The president stands between the twin mirrors of the past and future, causing his being to become reflected an infinite amount of times. At first, this can be very disorienting. But it induces the president to move quickly. He may, for example, mimic a wave with his arms in order to see how his actions extend across this mirroring of time, observing if the figure at the end acts at the same instant as the figure before him, and so on and so forth.

The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.

There is something in the human psyche that there is a connection between horses and humans, a real special kind of a thing, and I guess it’s always been there. I hope it will always be there, I hope we don’t evolve past that.