Past Quotes - Page 378

You can only understand the present age when it is past.

The USGA doesn't want to recognize the fact that today's players are better than ever. They seem willing to do anything to prevent us from shooting scores that would make us appear better than the great names of the past.

The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.

Use your past successes as a trampoline, not an easy chair.

Separation of church and state in Virginia, instead of weakening Christianity, as the conservatives of the Revolution had feared, really aided it in securing a power over men far greater than it had known in the past.

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.

Using the combined, integrated force of the mind and body is more efficient than using one without the other. Since the body can only exist in the present, that's where the mind should be too (unless we deliberately choose to contemplate the past or future). At the same time, the body needs to be healthy and in optimum operating condition so that it can respond effectively to the mind's directives.

The scientists are really scared. Their [global warming] observations over the past two or three years suggest that everything is happening a lot faster than their climate models predicted.

There is nothing in the world so dangerous, or so overwhelming as stupidity; perhaps there is no more of it now than there has been at any time, but I do not think the witless of past generations had so much power. The powers of darkness are the powers of misdirected knowledge.

I'm trying to be present, not thinking and worrying about the past or the future. That's such a waste of time, you know?

I find it really difficult to even articulate things that I've done in the past. I express myself through the characters that I play, not through the articulation of them later.

I've been asked to do action-oriented movies in the past and they just haven't been right for me.

Sometimes I'll go for something more because of the story, or more because of the director. But, generally, I have to feel like it's something that I have a real sympathy for - a person that I can completely go, "Oh, wow, oh, I'm there." Otherwise I don't feel like I will be able to pull it off at all. I know I haven't done everything very well in the past; some things have worked and some things haven't. But I need to feel like I can feel about the person, understand that person, I suppose.

One of the things that I've learned working with Madonna is you just move forward. It's really rare that she ever brings up the past.

The past is as powerless to darken the present moment as is a shadow to reach up and drag down the form that casts it.

Your past is just that, the past, a place within your psyche with no more reality to it then the picture of a castle on a postcard is made from stone.

During the past few years I have led a sometimes hard battle for German foreign policy.

Man did not address his inquiries to the earth on which he stood until a remarkably late stage in the development of his desire for knowledge. And the answers he received to the questions, "Where do I come from?", "What is man?", although they made him poorer by a few illusions, gave him in compensation a knowledge of his past that is vaster than he could ever have dreamed. For it emerged that the history of life was his history too.

What can you say about a guy who lets himself be saddled with a baby when he's thirty-five and losing his hair? Love? Forget about that till you're past seventy, and by then the parts will have stopped working anyway.

It's the difference between a parable and a pamphlet. A parable discusses things that are relevant in the past, the future, and the present - regardless of the outcome in the present. A pamphlet, on the other hand, is completely concerned with affecting an outcome in the present, the most immediate present.

No leader did more for his country than Winston Churchill. Brave, magnanimous, traditional, he was like a king-general from Britain's heroic past. His gigantic qualities set him apart from ordinary humanity; there seemed no danger he feared, no effort too great for his limitless energies.

People are powerfully moved by imagination, belief, and knowledge. They can consider the past and future. They can make changes in their behavior out of reason, in a way that animals can’t do.

For the past fourteen years, it's been my job to push past my boundaries and do things I never thought I could do, which is why it's been such a fulfilling career.

The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can't hurt you the way the future can.