Past Quotes - Page 288

Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.

Not to sound too Dr. Phil all of a sudden, but I think the key to survival is to embrace one's past and to not run away from it. And to come to some sort of relationship with it or understanding of it.

He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.

I think in the wake of 9/11, like a lot of Americans, you know, we were all very traumatized by the attacks, traumatized in a totally different way by some of what happened afterward in response. And I think there have been these questions hovering in the past decade of, what kind of country are we? Who are we?

Be happy. Decide to be happy. If you want to be happy, be happy! No one cares if you're happy or not, so why wait for permission? And did it really matter if you had been deeply unhappy in your past? Who but you remembered that?

We have to keep an eye on the future with a sense of the past in every passing moment of the present.

You can’t change the past, it just is

Our past may shape us, but it doesn't define who we become.

So briefly do we raise our heads, so quick sink back. For a moment we are lifted by a wave of time, are tossed up into the sunlight of consciousness We cannot see so far as where this wave began, but maybe we have waited some thousand years for it to come, and now it is on us. This is our moment, the wave is breaking. The crest which passes through us now in tumult was shaped by the past, and we in this moment are able to shape the crest which is to come.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".

The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.

Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.

In my garden I spend my days, in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past.

And so, in calm expectation of a blessed future and a finished work which will explain the past, in honest submission of out way to God, in supreme delight in Him who is the gladness of our joy, the secret of tranquillity will be ours.

There is no long interval between the sense of thirst and the trickling of the stream over the parched lip; but ever it is flowing, flowing past us, and the desire is but the opening of the lips to receive the limpid, and life-giving waters. No one ever desired the grace of God, really and truly desired it, but just in proportion as he desired it, he got it; just in proportion as he thirsted, he was satisfied.

The experience of past ages may inform us, that when the circumstances of a people render them distressed, their rulers generally recur to severe, cruel, and oppressive measures. Instead of endeavoring to establish their authority in the affection of their subjects, they think they have no security but in their fear.

Most people do not benefit from psychoanalysis because the trauma lies not in this life but in a past life.

What makes 'good tape'? That is the question that has consumed my life for the past 20 years, and I have an answer for you

But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.

My country has no history, only a past.

I have given up the ambition to be a great scholar. I want to be more- simply a human. . . . We are not true humans, but beings who live by a civilization inherited from the past, that keeps us hostage, that confines us. No freedom of movement. Nothing. Everything in us is killed by our calculations for our future, by our social position and cast. You see, I am not happy-yet I am happy. I suffer, but that is part of life. I live, I don't care about my existence, and that is the beginning of wisdom.

Most entertainment is trying to get you. It's tested, like toothpaste.

We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us.

I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

For at least the past 65 years, liberalism has been nothing if not an attempt to strike a balance between the needs of the community and the needs of individuals, between the need for freedom and the need for order.