Past Quotes - Page 289

Churches are more prosperous than at any time within the past several hundred years. But the alarming thing is that our gains are mostly external and our losses wholly internal; and since it is the quality of our religion that is affected by internal conditions, it may be that our supposed gains are but losses spread over a wider field.

The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane.

The lure of the past came up to grab me. To see a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint, through the sand was romantic. The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself.

The past is the father of the present.

Prayer doesn't work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening. I've paid attention. I've pictured what I want to happen in my life. I've meditated extensively on my family, my future, my past actions and what did and didn't work for me about them.

What interests us about the past is at least partly a function of what bothers us or makes us curious in the present.

When reading about what may be described as the lesser celebrated heroic figures of the Harlem Renaissance, we rarely get a definitive look at just how complicated and sometimes dangerous their everyday lives were. In fact, until the past ten years, many defined the period primarily by its well-known literary, musical, and artistic elements while overlooking the fact there was any political component to it at all.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented precisely such a hope - that America had learned from its past and acted to secure a better tomorrow.

Lev (Léon) Shestov, a Russian Jew who later became a French Jew and even converted to Catholicism, defined God not by His power to create the laws of universe, but His ability to break them at will - the capacity for miracles. God could cancel the past! For instance, God could decide retrospectively, that Socrates was never poisoned... Assimilation demanded a miracle: that you stop having been somebody else before... But only God can do it.

Cornelius Castoriadis, the great French social philosopher of Greek origin, was asked once by an exasperated interviewer: "What do you want, Mr. Castoriadis - to change humanity?" He answered: "No, God forbid, I only want humanity to change itself, as it has done so many times in the past." I would be inclined to answer the same way.

The task is to keep the lost opportunities of the past alive.

There's a desire for me in the work, even when I'm looking at the past, to be looking from the present. It's to be here now. It's looking in the present tense.

I’ve basically been working really hard for the past couple years. And the nature of the film business is that movies come out when they come out, and these all just happen to be coming out at the same time.

There is another movie I love that always sticks with me and influenced me called "Frankie" starring Diane Kruger as a model past her prime trying to make it work and going crazy from how she is treated.

I'm very inspired by a lot of things from the past, from Cher to Diana Ross.

It was a kiss from the past.

Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.

I felt like, in the recent past, people have been apologizing for Superman, a little bit, for his costume, for his origins, and for the way he fits into society.

With Dawn I was afraid people would just think it's a B-movie and I didn't know what I was doing. That's really what I was afraid of. Like the subtlety of the movie they would miss. If the movie succeeds, it's that people understand the subtlety. That they're able to see past the conventions of what they think a movie is and go a teeny bit deeper and let it be both.

I'm a big believer in the notion that our greatest potential lies in our darkest parts. To a certain extent it's only in facing those parts of ourselves that we can truly grow, and I think that's true of all of the characters I've played, certainly in the past few years.

Television is a pretty great job, to begin with, and I wouldn't have anything, if it weren't for the jobs that I've had in the past that have built up to that

There's a lot of stuff that I've been through in my life in the past couple of months that I don't really want to share with people who are close to me, but I have no option if it's my art.

I became very aware of what I was used to relying on, almost tricks. It's funny because I could feel myself creating a formula and sticking with it and I just told myself, 'That's not me, that's not really how I am, god forbid I have developed a formula - it's music; songwriting.' It's heretic, honestly, in the church of music, so I had to unwind a few tricks in order to get past it.

Now that 'Scrubs' is over, people seem to feel more comfortable telling me that I was a total douche to them for the past 8 years. And the whole time I'm thinking, 'Who ARE you?'

After all, history is a type of fantasy. For all the primary source research, in the end, the past world the historian builds is as weird and remote from our own as Middle Earth or Narnia, yet oddly familiar.