It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.
- Mark Twain
When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
- Lynn Abbey
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
- Berenice Abbott
Over the past few years, the road to confrontation has shown its consequences: loss of innocent lives, destruction and fear. Most costly, however, was the loss of hope. The most precious gift that you can present to your peoples over the coming weeks is renewed hope born out of tangible progress on the ground.
- King Abdullah Ii
One should learn the lessons of history. The mistakes of the past need only be made once. Unless there are no other choices.
- Joe Abercrombie
Honest men are so very rare, they are often mistaken for criminals, for rebels, for madmen. What were your crimes, anyway, but to be different?'
'Robbery the first time, and I served seven years. When they caught me again there were eighty-four counts, with fourteen murders.'
Cosca cocked an eyebrow. 'But we're you truly guilty?'
'Yes'
He frowned for a moment then waved it away. 'Nobody's perfect. Lets leave the past behind us.
- Joe Abercrombie
That's what courage is. Taking your disappointments and your failures, your guilt and your shame, all the wounds received and inflicted, and sinking them in the past. Starting again. Damning yesterday and facing tomorrow with your head held high. Times change. It's those that see it coming, and plan for it, and change themselves to suit that prosper.
- Joe Abercrombie
When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.
- Aberjhani
Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.
- Aberjhani
In the past few years I have begun the process of becoming a new man.
- Jack Abramoff
I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them
- Chinua Achebe
If we learn the art of yielding what must be yielded to the changing present, we can save the best of the past.
- Dean Acheson
By a series of violent shocks, the nations in succession have struggled to shake off the Past, to reverse the action of Time and the verdict of success, and to rescue the world from the reign of the dead.
- John Acton
If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.
- John Acton
The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future.
- Lord Acton
[The romantic chivalric tradition] takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man's eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars.
- J R R Tolkien
There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as though a chink in the dark: light out of the past. It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice agin, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things.
- J R R Tolkien
For a while the hobbits continued to talk and think of the past journey and of the perils that lay ahead; but such was the virtue of the land of Rivendell that soon all fear and anxiety was lifted from their minds. The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have any power over the present. Health and hope grew strong in them, and they were content with each good day as it came, taking pleasure in every meal, and in every word and song.
- J R R Tolkien
Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.
- Douglas Adams
How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?
- Douglas Adams
Such decisions will be far reaching and difficult. But you never lacked courage in the past. Your courage is now needed for the future.
- Gerry Adams
In the past I have defended the right of the IRA to engage in armed struggle. I did so because there was no alternative for those who would not bend the knee, or turn a blind eye to oppression, or for those who wanted a national republic.
- Gerry Adams
While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.
- Ronald Reagan
I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future.
- Ronald Reagan
The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action.
- Felix Adler
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
- Theodor Adorno
It is true, there are many bad people; there are more of them than in the past, but that is because there are more people, meaning the population has tripled; there must be three times more bad people.
- Bhumibol Adulyadej
I am concerned because even in the past two years that were the jubilee years, I have seen evident signs which show that the people are still in great difficulties, and there are things that still need to be remedied and looked after in many areas.
- Bhumibol Adulyadej
Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.
- Harry S Truman
I've been criticized for not having perspective in the past and I thought that of myself many times but not there.
- Andre Agassi
Even God cannot change the past.
- Agathon
The future belongs to all who, refusing to look back at the past move ahead with the clock as it ticks.
- Odo Simon Agbo
The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as the generation gap.
- Spiro T Agnew
Forget the past, think of future, remember God's goodness and His power and ability to take you to where you ought to be and establish you.
- Jaachynma N E Agu
Consistency is the paste jewel that only cheap men cherish.
- William Allen White
It is okay of talking about the past, as long as there's no bitterness and anger. It only gives you a heart attack. It won't change the past either.
- Ann Marie Aguilar
Sometimes the past needed to stay buried; it was the only way you could move on. And sometimes you had to dig it up, because that too was the only way.
- Ann Aguirre
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
- James Joyce
He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.
- James Joyce
As the future ripens in the past,
so the past rots in the future --
a terrible festival of dead leaves.
- Anna Akhmatova
Rising from the past, my shadow
Is running in silence to meet me.
- Anna Akhmatova
The Cruise missiles do not frighten anyone. We are catching them like fish in a river. I mean here that over the past two days, we managed to shoot down 196 missiles before they hit their target.
- Mohammed Saeed Al Sahaf
Such is how Science makes progress: not destroying the past, but learning from it, and building on it.
- Felix Alba Juez
The past and the future are not a collection of instants shared by all space, but a collection of events that correspond to a possible relation of causal order with the present event.
- Felix Alba Juez
Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do"; "Accept the past as past without denying it or discarding it"; "Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others"; "Don't assume that it's too late to get involved."
"Dying, is only one thing to be sad over. Living unhappily is something else. So many of the people who come to visit me are unhappy." - Tuesday With Morrie
- Mitch Albom
Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.
- Mitch Albom
He wrote bite-sized philosophies about living with death's shadow: "Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do"; "Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it"; "Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others"; "Don't assume that it's too late to get involved.
- Mitch Albom
And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only.
- Paulo Coelho
One always has to know when a stage comes to an end. If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through. Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.
- Paulo Coelho
Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment though, is outside of time, it's Eternity. It isn;t what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity. In India they use the word "karma" for lack of any better term. But it's a concept that's rarely given a proper explanation. It isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
The past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one's dreams would have no meaning.
- Paulo Coelho
The future would end up finding out the truth about the past.
- Paulo Coelho
It isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn't matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.
- Paulo Coelho
Everything which is done in the present, affects the future by consequence, and the past by redemption.
- Paulo Coelho
Do not concern yourself with what you know or what you do not know. Do not think about the past or the future, merely allow God's hands to write the surprises of the present on each new day.
- Paulo Coelho
We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use in the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It's always new.
- Paulo Coelho
It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
A very wise man once told me that you can't look back-you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.
- Jodi Picoult
You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your futue
- Jodi Picoult
because in the past words have only driven them apart.
- Jodi Picoult
In the past, even Alex's promises hadn't prevented a reoccurence. She didn't have a choice. She wished he could see that as clearly as she did.
- Jodi Picoult
To envision the future; you must forget the past and make the present a memory
- Jeremy Aldana
Your message is stupid. Iraq is not afraid of you or anyone else when it has a right to claim. What you warned about is not on Iraq's agenda. Iraq is vital and powerful. It is not an opportunistic country. Your administration has not learned from the past.
- Mohammed Aldouri
Without you, I'm lost, fumbling and falling
Missing so much of who you were
If I could change the past, I'd take it all back
I'd turn back time, I'd take away the pain
I'd make sure I didn't leave without you
- Monica Alexander
There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.
- Christopher Alexander
Maia pulled on a braid. "I ran into Eric of all people. He told me what happened and that you'd backed out of Millenium Lint's gigs for the past two weeks because of it."
"Actually, they changed their name," Jordan said. "They're Midnight Burrito now.
- Cassandra Clare
He'd felt like a jack-o-lantern for the past few days, as if his guts had been yanked out with a fork and dumped in a heap while a grinning smile stayed plastered on his face.
- Cassandra Clare
The warlock's gaze, on the flames, was remote and distant, as if he were looking back into the past. Simon couldn't help but remember what Magnus had said to him once, about living forever:
Someday you and I will be the only two left.
- Cassandra Clare
The past is nothing to [the young], not even another country as it is to the old, or even a nightmare as it is to the guilty.
- Cassandra Clare
I just don't see why the past has to matter.
- Cassandra Clare
You could give me the past," he said a little sadly. "But Alec is my future.
- Cassandra Clare
Now that the real and the imagined had collided, he wondered if she, like he, longed for the past, for the normal. He wondered if normalcy was something, like vision or silence, you didn't realize was precious until you lost it.
- Cassandra Clare
You can't forget the things you did in the past, or you'll never learn from them.
- Cassandra Clare
The past always matters. You cant forget the things you did in the past, or youll never learn from them.
- Cassandra Clare
Yeah, well, you clearly also couldn't be bothered to call me and tell me you were shacking up with some dyed-blond wanna-be goth you probably met at Pandemonium. After I spent the past three days wondering if you were dead."
"I was not shacking up," Clary said, glad of the darkness as the blood rushed to her face.
"And my hair is naturally blond," said Jace. "Just for the record."
Simon, Clary, and Jace, pg. 115
- Cassandra Clare
You couldn't change the past. You could only go forward
- Cassandra Clare
One of the things he loved about Clary was how easily caught up in her imagination she was, how easily she could wall herself away in illusory worlds of curses and princes and destiny and magic. Once he had been able to do the same... Now that the real and the imagined had collided, he wondered if she, like he, longed for the past, for the normal. He wondered if normalcy was something, like a vision or silence, you didn't realize it was precious until you lost it.
- Cassandra Clare
When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy.
- Elizabeth Gilbert
Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
- Ernest Hemingway
Forget the past - the future will give you plenty to worry about.
- George Allen Sr
Fate never promises to tell you everything up front. You aren't always shown the path in life you're supposed to take. But if there was one thing she'd learned in the past few weeks, it was that sometimes, when you're really lucky, you meet someone with a map.
- Sarah Addison Allen
Despite the increase in world attention toward Sudan in the past months, the genocide in Darfur has continued without any serious attempt by the Sudanese government to do what governments primarily exist to do, protect their citizens.
- Tom Allen
You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.
- Woody Allen
Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.
- Steven Wright
Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future
- Maxim Gorky
In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere.
- Maxim Gorky
In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.
- Maxim Gorky
I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evenesce, to untangle the confusion of my past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing.
- Isabel Allende
I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you're from or what you did before.
- Isabel Allende
Morelli smiled. "It could have been Jenny Ragucci. That makes much more sense. I had good luck with sluts."
I looked over at him.
All in the past," Morelli said. "I'm a cupcake man now."
Whoa, dude," Mooner said. "That's so, like, cosmic.
- Janet Evanovich
I think in the past I think I probably was a little too diverse, probably went from one spectrum to the complete opposite and confusing people.
- Marc Almond
For the past eight years, the right has been better at working the refs. Now the left is learning how to play the game.
- Eric Alterman
But Valentine, why despair, why always paint the future in such sombre hues?" Maximilien asked.
"Because, my friend, I judge it by the past.
- Alexandre Dumas
I leave CNN with the utmost respect, love and admiration for the company and everyone who works here. This has been my family and shared endeavor for the past 27 years, and I am forever grateful and proud of all that we have accomplished.
- Christiane Amanpour
I have spent the past ten years in just about every war zone there was.
- Christiane Amanpour
The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.
- Stephen Ambrose
In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past - a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.
- Henri Frederic Amiel
When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
- Martin Amis
History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.
- Heather Anastasiu
So it allows me to travel, I'll be doing that and running these great rivers and doing what I've done in the past without much purpose other than for the experience.
- Richard Dean Anderson
People who live in the past generally are afraid to compete in the present. I've got my faults, but living in the past is not one of them. There's no future in it.
- Sparky Anderson
I think of the past and the future as well as the present to determine where I am, and I move on while thinking of these things.
- Tadao Ando
Sometimes I think I live more closely to the past than the present.
- Patricia Briggs
Charles could care less about shoes - and he suspected he wasn't alone among men in his feelings. Shoe, no shoe, he didn't care. Naked was good, though over the past couple of weeks he was beginning to think that dressed in his clothes was a decent second best.
- Patricia Briggs
Things change whether you want them to, or not--unless you are dead. Don't hold so hard to the past that you die with it.
- Patricia Briggs
So initiate us," Claire said, crossing her arms and narrowing her eyes in challenge. "Make us priests and priestesses of Apollo."
"Say that again," Jason said, turning to Claire. He was so stunned there was almost no expression on his face.
"That's the plan you've been working on for the past two days? The one you told us not to worry about?" Matt asked in an increasingly high-pitched voice.
"Yup.
- Josephine Angelini
The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present.
- Barbara De Angelis
Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.
- Maya Angelou
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
- Maya Angelou
Forgivness is letting go of the hope that the past can be changed
- Oprah Winfrey
Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different, it's accepting the past for what it was, and using this moment and this time to help yourself move forward.
- Oprah Winfrey
Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.
- Hermann Hesse
... the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future.
- Hermann Hesse
The past does not have to be your prison. You have a voice in your destiny. You have a say in your life. You have a choice in the path you take.
- Max Lucado
So stop looking at the past and all the things you can't change. They're done and over with. Now is the time for you to look to the future, grasp it by the hand, and decide where you want to go. I told you once before, and I'll say it againthis is your life, Chase. Only you can decide what it's going to be like. Don't let outside forces dictate it for you.
- Lacey Weatherford
I wish that I could turn back time
cause now the guilt is all mine
can't live without
the trust from those you love
I know we can't forget the past
you can't forget love & pride
because of that, it's killing me inside
- Mike Wyzgowski (interpreted)
- Hideaki Anno
When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.
- Jean Anouilh
The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.
- David Antin
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
- Thomas Jefferson
And I did wonder - because it's now three years ago since I left prison - whether there would come a time when I would forget it, or it would be in the past as anything else might be - no, it's there every day of my life.
- Jeffrey Archer
Risks are a measure of people. People who won't take them are trying to preserve what they have. People who do take them often end up having more.
Some risks have a future, and some people call them wrong. But being right may be like walking backwards proving where you've been.
Being wrong isn't in the future, or in the past.
Being wrong isn't anywhere but being here.
Best place to be, eh?
- Paul Arden
There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
- Hannah Arendt
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.
- Hannah Arendt
Life is fragile and temporary. The faces of today quickly become the faces of the past. Sorrow, pain, and anger... it all fades-
except love. Love is forever and there after, even when we've fallen to our graves.
- Lee Argus
We were each other's only link to the past... that was the strength of our bond, and also our weakness.
- Lisa Kleypas
It seemed important to figure out how much of the attraction I felt for Hardy came from now, as opposed to the past. If we had met now. for the first time, as strangers, would I have felt the same about him?
I couldn't have said for certain.
- Lisa Kleypas
In the past year I've gotten used to being cut down to size whenever I start acting too high and mighty. If you didn't keep me in line,I'd be damn well unmanageable. As it is, you're going to have a lot of work to do once they leave.
- Lisa Kleypas
She didn't want to know. She didn't want to feel sympathy for him. She didn't want to know this insistent urge to take him in her arms and offer comfort for things that had happened so long ago. It was all in the past, she reminded herself. He didn't need comfort or sympathy now, and he certainly didn't need any silly attempts of her to approach him.
- Lisa Kleypas
I may have been dead for the past hundred and fifty years, Susannah,...but that doesn't mean I don't know how people say good night. And generally, when people say good night, they keep their tongues to themselves.
- Meg Cabot
I've never enjoyed myself more than I have the past forty-eight hours, during which I've been trapped in a car with one of the worst drivers I've ever seen, run up the Spanish Steps and then down again so I could be on time to wait in line to perjuer myself at the American consulate. And I'd like to continue doing those sorts of thing with you on a regular basis for the foreseeable future.
- Meg Cabot
it's only by studying the mistakes of the past," Lucien
said mildly, "that we can even have a future
- Meg Cabot
Hours and days and months and years go by; the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know; but whatever the time gives us in which we live, we should therefore be content.
- Quintus Tullius Cicero
In the past ABC has made half-hearted efforts or, worse, cosmetic efforts, to do something about news and I wasn't certain about what their real aim was - nor am I now.
- Roone Arledge
I don't think the news department will have to lie down and play dead like it has in the past. By and large the network has been understanding, but then so have I.
- Roone Arledge
People tend to look on the beliefs of the past as being primitive and unintelligent, yet we are seeing more truth in the past every day.
- Jennifer L Armentrout
I'd always avoided confrontation in the past, but tihs guy was flipping my bitch switch like nothing else.
- Jennifer L Armentrout
I've always avoided confrontation in the past, but this guy was flipping my bitch switch like nothing else.
- Jennifer L Armentrout
Just to cover the increase in fuel costs over the past two years, American would have had to raise fares nearly $75 per round-trip ticket. During this time period, our average fare increased by only $15.
- Gerard Arpey
One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image.
- Timothy Garton Ash
You can't stop the future
You can't rewind the past
The only way to learn the secret
...is to press play.
- Jay Asher
I can't. You can't rewrite the past.
- Jay Asher
We remained at our encampment of this day until the morning of the 7th, when we descended ten miles lower down and encamped on a spot of ground where several thousand Indians had wintered during the past season.
- William Henry Ashley
I just got Kill Bill: Vol. 2. I've watched it like eight times in the past two months. I just love the scene at the end between David Carradine and Uma Thurman.
- Shawn Ashmore
Controversy and contention are weakening habits. If Satan can succeed in creating in us the pastime of arguing, quarreling, and contention, it is easier for him to bind us with heavier sins which can destroy our eternal lives. Anger is a poor substitute for self-mastery and compassionate service.
- Marvin J Ashton
They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.
- Isaac Asimov
It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research.
- Isaac Asimov
The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all.
- Isaac Asimov
Don't you see? It's Galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration - a stagnation!
- Isaac Asimov
You know, they just don't make big movie stars the way they used to, maybe because the system has changed, the studio system, but it's sad to see people like Jimmy Stewart go, all the giants of the past.
- Tom Atkins
He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.
- Kate Atkinson
Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.
- Brooks Atkinson
In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred,It is a paryer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present.
- Amelia Atwater Rhodes
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
- Margaret Atwood
All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.
- Margaret Atwood
While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
- Margaret Atwood
Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the pastthe past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
- Margaret Atwood
But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
- Margaret Atwood
I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.
- Margaret Atwood
As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.
- Margaret Atwood
So Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so muc.
- Margaret Atwood
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
- Thomas Carlyle
You list the dead. You tell the stories of the past. You write about the catastrophes and the massacres. What about the living, Finnikin? Who honors them?
- Melina Marchetta
Play me something that makes me feel;
This soul inside me is made of steel.
Brain is breathing, but heart's not beating
And, babe, I need you to make things real.
Walk inside me without silence,
Kill the past and change the tense.
Empty gnawing and the ache is soaring;
Take me places that make more sense.
- Melina Marchetta
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.
- W H Auden
To a father, when a child dies, the future dies; to a child when a parent dies, the past dies.
- Red Auerbach
How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.
- Saint Augustine Of Hippo
No one can lose either the past or the future - how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess?... It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived: and if this is all he has, he cannot lose what he does not have.
- Marcus Aurelius
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.
- Marcus Aurelius
Learn from the past, but don't live in the past.
- Steve Maraboli
Do not belong to the past dawns,but to the noons of future
- Sri Aurobindo
The past, present, and future, were all equally in gloom.
- Jane Austen
Her mind was all disorder. The past, present, future, every thing was terrible.
- Jane Austen
You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
- Jane Austen
Think only on the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure
- Jane Austen
The evils arising from the loss of her uncle were neither trifling nor likely to lessen; and when thought had been freely indulged, in contrasting the past and the present, the employment of mind and dissipation of unpleasant ideas which only reading could produce made her thankfully turn to a book.
- Jane Austen
My object then," replied Darcy, "was to show you, by every civility in my power, that I was not so mean as to resent the past; and I hoped to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill opinion, by letting you see that your reproofs had been attended to. How soon any other wishes introduced themselves I can hardly tell, but I believe in about half an hour after I had seen you.
- Jane Austen
Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
- Jane Austen
He has been marked by the past, and once that happens, nothing can be
done about it. Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on
happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.
- Paul Auster
Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance.
- Paul Auster
Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'.
- Paul Auster
Thank you.
It used to be knee length, but then I discovered that when I get angry I like to cut things.
I'm not allowed to have scissors any more.
It's still pretty lengthy, but I've been threatening to shave half of it for the past week and nobody seems to believe me...
I do it all myself though because I scream when I'm touched and that scares people.
- Emilie Autumn
Let us forget the past - this is the only way to be genuinely surprised.
- Steve Aylett
Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.
- Lauren Bacall
You realize yourself when you start reflecting - because I don't live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are - that you can't ignore it. But I don't look at scrapbooks.
- Lauren Bacall
We can start working with time, if you wish, till you can fly the past and the future. And then you will be ready to begin the most difficult, the most powerful, the most fun of all. You will be ready to BEGIN to fly up and know the meaning of kindness and of love
- Richard Bach
Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.
- Louise J Kaplan
One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
- Gaston Bachelard
What if all I'd ever known was how it had been for the past three years - me being an unwanted outsider in my own family?
I might have turned out like Aphrodite, and I might still be letting my parents control me because I was hoping desperately that I would be good enough, make them proud, so that some day they would really love me.
- P C Cast
Ancient mirror
Macick mirror
Shades of gray
Hidden
Forbidden
Within, away
Part the mist
Macick kissed
Call the fey
Reveal the past
The spell is cast
I save the day!
- P C Cast
Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
We each have a story. They did this to us. There was no outside aggressor. They wanted an Apocalypse. They wanted the end. And they made it happen. It was orchestrated - who got in, who didn't. There was a master list. We weren't on it. We were left here to die. They want to erase us, the past, but we can't let them.
- Julianna Baggott
There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you if you don't repeat it.
- Pearl Bailey
Out of the past come the standards for judging the present; standards in turn to be shaped by the practice of present-day dramatists into broader standards for the next generation.
- George P Baker
I don't really drink very much, although I have abused alcohol in the past.
- Daniel Baldwin
I went backwards and forwards over it until I was 22. And then in the past few years I began to say to myself, OK, look, I'm not messing around. This is something I want to attack, instead of thinking, I'll just see what happens with it.
- Christian Bale
The love of glory is like the bridge that Satan built across Chaos to pass from Hell to Paradise: glory links the past with the future across a bottomless abyss. Nothing to my son, except my name!
- Napoleon Bonaparte
If we could read the past histories of all our enemies we would disregard all hostility for them.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
- Mark Twain
When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
- Lynn Abbey
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
- Berenice Abbott
Over the past few years, the road to confrontation has shown its consequences: loss of innocent lives, destruction and fear. Most costly, however, was the loss of hope. The most precious gift that you can present to your peoples over the coming weeks is renewed hope born out of tangible progress on the ground.
- King Abdullah Ii
One should learn the lessons of history. The mistakes of the past need only be made once. Unless there are no other choices.
- Joe Abercrombie
Honest men are so very rare, they are often mistaken for criminals, for rebels, for madmen. What were your crimes, anyway, but to be different?'
'Robbery the first time, and I served seven years. When they caught me again there were eighty-four counts, with fourteen murders.'
Cosca cocked an eyebrow. 'But we're you truly guilty?'
'Yes'
He frowned for a moment then waved it away. 'Nobody's perfect. Lets leave the past behind us.
- Joe Abercrombie
That's what courage is. Taking your disappointments and your failures, your guilt and your shame, all the wounds received and inflicted, and sinking them in the past. Starting again. Damning yesterday and facing tomorrow with your head held high. Times change. It's those that see it coming, and plan for it, and change themselves to suit that prosper.
- Joe Abercrombie
When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.
- Aberjhani
Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.
- Aberjhani
In the past few years I have begun the process of becoming a new man.
- Jack Abramoff
I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them
- Chinua Achebe
If we learn the art of yielding what must be yielded to the changing present, we can save the best of the past.
- Dean Acheson
By a series of violent shocks, the nations in succession have struggled to shake off the Past, to reverse the action of Time and the verdict of success, and to rescue the world from the reign of the dead.
- John Acton
If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.
- John Acton
The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future.
- Lord Acton
[The romantic chivalric tradition] takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man's eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars.
- J R R Tolkien
There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as though a chink in the dark: light out of the past. It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice agin, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things.
- J R R Tolkien
For a while the hobbits continued to talk and think of the past journey and of the perils that lay ahead; but such was the virtue of the land of Rivendell that soon all fear and anxiety was lifted from their minds. The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have any power over the present. Health and hope grew strong in them, and they were content with each good day as it came, taking pleasure in every meal, and in every word and song.
- J R R Tolkien
Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.
- Douglas Adams
How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?
- Douglas Adams
Such decisions will be far reaching and difficult. But you never lacked courage in the past. Your courage is now needed for the future.
- Gerry Adams
In the past I have defended the right of the IRA to engage in armed struggle. I did so because there was no alternative for those who would not bend the knee, or turn a blind eye to oppression, or for those who wanted a national republic.
- Gerry Adams
While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.
- Ronald Reagan
I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future.
- Ronald Reagan
The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action.
- Felix Adler
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
- Theodor Adorno
It is true, there are many bad people; there are more of them than in the past, but that is because there are more people, meaning the population has tripled; there must be three times more bad people.
- Bhumibol Adulyadej
I am concerned because even in the past two years that were the jubilee years, I have seen evident signs which show that the people are still in great difficulties, and there are things that still need to be remedied and looked after in many areas.
- Bhumibol Adulyadej
Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.
- Harry S Truman
I've been criticized for not having perspective in the past and I thought that of myself many times but not there.
- Andre Agassi
Even God cannot change the past.
- Agathon
The future belongs to all who, refusing to look back at the past move ahead with the clock as it ticks.
- Odo Simon Agbo
The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as the generation gap.
- Spiro T Agnew
Forget the past, think of future, remember God's goodness and His power and ability to take you to where you ought to be and establish you.
- Jaachynma N E Agu
Consistency is the paste jewel that only cheap men cherish.
- William Allen White
It is okay of talking about the past, as long as there's no bitterness and anger. It only gives you a heart attack. It won't change the past either.
- Ann Marie Aguilar
Sometimes the past needed to stay buried; it was the only way you could move on. And sometimes you had to dig it up, because that too was the only way.
- Ann Aguirre
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
- James Joyce
He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.
- James Joyce
As the future ripens in the past,
so the past rots in the future --
a terrible festival of dead leaves.
- Anna Akhmatova
Rising from the past, my shadow
Is running in silence to meet me.
- Anna Akhmatova
The Cruise missiles do not frighten anyone. We are catching them like fish in a river. I mean here that over the past two days, we managed to shoot down 196 missiles before they hit their target.
- Mohammed Saeed Al Sahaf
Such is how Science makes progress: not destroying the past, but learning from it, and building on it.
- Felix Alba Juez
The past and the future are not a collection of instants shared by all space, but a collection of events that correspond to a possible relation of causal order with the present event.
- Felix Alba Juez
Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do"; "Accept the past as past without denying it or discarding it"; "Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others"; "Don't assume that it's too late to get involved."
"Dying, is only one thing to be sad over. Living unhappily is something else. So many of the people who come to visit me are unhappy." - Tuesday With Morrie
- Mitch Albom
Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.
- Mitch Albom
He wrote bite-sized philosophies about living with death's shadow: "Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do"; "Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it"; "Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others"; "Don't assume that it's too late to get involved.
- Mitch Albom
And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only.
- Paulo Coelho
One always has to know when a stage comes to an end. If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through. Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.
- Paulo Coelho
Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment though, is outside of time, it's Eternity. It isn;t what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity. In India they use the word "karma" for lack of any better term. But it's a concept that's rarely given a proper explanation. It isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
The past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one's dreams would have no meaning.
- Paulo Coelho
The future would end up finding out the truth about the past.
- Paulo Coelho
It isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn't matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.
- Paulo Coelho
Everything which is done in the present, affects the future by consequence, and the past by redemption.
- Paulo Coelho
Do not concern yourself with what you know or what you do not know. Do not think about the past or the future, merely allow God's hands to write the surprises of the present on each new day.
- Paulo Coelho
We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use in the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It's always new.
- Paulo Coelho
It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
- Paulo Coelho
A very wise man once told me that you can't look back-you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.
- Jodi Picoult
You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your futue
- Jodi Picoult
because in the past words have only driven them apart.
- Jodi Picoult
In the past, even Alex's promises hadn't prevented a reoccurence. She didn't have a choice. She wished he could see that as clearly as she did.
- Jodi Picoult
To envision the future; you must forget the past and make the present a memory
- Jeremy Aldana
Your message is stupid. Iraq is not afraid of you or anyone else when it has a right to claim. What you warned about is not on Iraq's agenda. Iraq is vital and powerful. It is not an opportunistic country. Your administration has not learned from the past.
- Mohammed Aldouri
Without you, I'm lost, fumbling and falling
Missing so much of who you were
If I could change the past, I'd take it all back
I'd turn back time, I'd take away the pain
I'd make sure I didn't leave without you
- Monica Alexander
There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.
- Christopher Alexander
Maia pulled on a braid. "I ran into Eric of all people. He told me what happened and that you'd backed out of Millenium Lint's gigs for the past two weeks because of it."
"Actually, they changed their name," Jordan said. "They're Midnight Burrito now.
- Cassandra Clare
He'd felt like a jack-o-lantern for the past few days, as if his guts had been yanked out with a fork and dumped in a heap while a grinning smile stayed plastered on his face.
- Cassandra Clare
The warlock's gaze, on the flames, was remote and distant, as if he were looking back into the past. Simon couldn't help but remember what Magnus had said to him once, about living forever:
Someday you and I will be the only two left.
- Cassandra Clare
The past is nothing to [the young], not even another country as it is to the old, or even a nightmare as it is to the guilty.
- Cassandra Clare
I just don't see why the past has to matter.
- Cassandra Clare
You could give me the past," he said a little sadly. "But Alec is my future.
- Cassandra Clare
Now that the real and the imagined had collided, he wondered if she, like he, longed for the past, for the normal. He wondered if normalcy was something, like vision or silence, you didn't realize was precious until you lost it.
- Cassandra Clare
You can't forget the things you did in the past, or you'll never learn from them.
- Cassandra Clare
The past always matters. You cant forget the things you did in the past, or youll never learn from them.
- Cassandra Clare
Yeah, well, you clearly also couldn't be bothered to call me and tell me you were shacking up with some dyed-blond wanna-be goth you probably met at Pandemonium. After I spent the past three days wondering if you were dead."
"I was not shacking up," Clary said, glad of the darkness as the blood rushed to her face.
"And my hair is naturally blond," said Jace. "Just for the record."
Simon, Clary, and Jace, pg. 115
- Cassandra Clare
You couldn't change the past. You could only go forward
- Cassandra Clare
One of the things he loved about Clary was how easily caught up in her imagination she was, how easily she could wall herself away in illusory worlds of curses and princes and destiny and magic. Once he had been able to do the same... Now that the real and the imagined had collided, he wondered if she, like he, longed for the past, for the normal. He wondered if normalcy was something, like a vision or silence, you didn't realize it was precious until you lost it.
- Cassandra Clare
When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy.
- Elizabeth Gilbert
Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
- Ernest Hemingway
Forget the past - the future will give you plenty to worry about.
- George Allen Sr
Fate never promises to tell you everything up front. You aren't always shown the path in life you're supposed to take. But if there was one thing she'd learned in the past few weeks, it was that sometimes, when you're really lucky, you meet someone with a map.
- Sarah Addison Allen
Despite the increase in world attention toward Sudan in the past months, the genocide in Darfur has continued without any serious attempt by the Sudanese government to do what governments primarily exist to do, protect their citizens.
- Tom Allen
You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.
- Woody Allen
Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.
- Steven Wright
Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future
- Maxim Gorky
In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere.
- Maxim Gorky
In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.
- Maxim Gorky
I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evenesce, to untangle the confusion of my past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing.
- Isabel Allende
I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you're from or what you did before.
- Isabel Allende
Morelli smiled. "It could have been Jenny Ragucci. That makes much more sense. I had good luck with sluts."
I looked over at him.
All in the past," Morelli said. "I'm a cupcake man now."
Whoa, dude," Mooner said. "That's so, like, cosmic.
- Janet Evanovich
I think in the past I think I probably was a little too diverse, probably went from one spectrum to the complete opposite and confusing people.
- Marc Almond
For the past eight years, the right has been better at working the refs. Now the left is learning how to play the game.
- Eric Alterman
But Valentine, why despair, why always paint the future in such sombre hues?" Maximilien asked.
"Because, my friend, I judge it by the past.
- Alexandre Dumas
I leave CNN with the utmost respect, love and admiration for the company and everyone who works here. This has been my family and shared endeavor for the past 27 years, and I am forever grateful and proud of all that we have accomplished.
- Christiane Amanpour
I have spent the past ten years in just about every war zone there was.
- Christiane Amanpour
The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.
- Stephen Ambrose
In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past - a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.
- Henri Frederic Amiel
When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
- Martin Amis
History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.
- Heather Anastasiu
So it allows me to travel, I'll be doing that and running these great rivers and doing what I've done in the past without much purpose other than for the experience.
- Richard Dean Anderson
People who live in the past generally are afraid to compete in the present. I've got my faults, but living in the past is not one of them. There's no future in it.
- Sparky Anderson
I think of the past and the future as well as the present to determine where I am, and I move on while thinking of these things.
- Tadao Ando
Sometimes I think I live more closely to the past than the present.
- Patricia Briggs
Charles could care less about shoes - and he suspected he wasn't alone among men in his feelings. Shoe, no shoe, he didn't care. Naked was good, though over the past couple of weeks he was beginning to think that dressed in his clothes was a decent second best.
- Patricia Briggs
Things change whether you want them to, or not--unless you are dead. Don't hold so hard to the past that you die with it.
- Patricia Briggs
So initiate us," Claire said, crossing her arms and narrowing her eyes in challenge. "Make us priests and priestesses of Apollo."
"Say that again," Jason said, turning to Claire. He was so stunned there was almost no expression on his face.
"That's the plan you've been working on for the past two days? The one you told us not to worry about?" Matt asked in an increasingly high-pitched voice.
"Yup.
- Josephine Angelini
The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present.
- Barbara De Angelis
Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.
- Maya Angelou
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
- Maya Angelou
Forgivness is letting go of the hope that the past can be changed
- Oprah Winfrey
Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different, it's accepting the past for what it was, and using this moment and this time to help yourself move forward.
- Oprah Winfrey
Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.
- Hermann Hesse
... the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future.
- Hermann Hesse
The past does not have to be your prison. You have a voice in your destiny. You have a say in your life. You have a choice in the path you take.
- Max Lucado
So stop looking at the past and all the things you can't change. They're done and over with. Now is the time for you to look to the future, grasp it by the hand, and decide where you want to go. I told you once before, and I'll say it againthis is your life, Chase. Only you can decide what it's going to be like. Don't let outside forces dictate it for you.
- Lacey Weatherford
I wish that I could turn back time
cause now the guilt is all mine
can't live without
the trust from those you love
I know we can't forget the past
you can't forget love & pride
because of that, it's killing me inside
- Mike Wyzgowski (interpreted)
- Hideaki Anno
When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.
- Jean Anouilh
The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.
- David Antin
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
- Thomas Jefferson
And I did wonder - because it's now three years ago since I left prison - whether there would come a time when I would forget it, or it would be in the past as anything else might be - no, it's there every day of my life.
- Jeffrey Archer
Risks are a measure of people. People who won't take them are trying to preserve what they have. People who do take them often end up having more.
Some risks have a future, and some people call them wrong. But being right may be like walking backwards proving where you've been.
Being wrong isn't in the future, or in the past.
Being wrong isn't anywhere but being here.
Best place to be, eh?
- Paul Arden
There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
- Hannah Arendt
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.
- Hannah Arendt
Life is fragile and temporary. The faces of today quickly become the faces of the past. Sorrow, pain, and anger... it all fades-
except love. Love is forever and there after, even when we've fallen to our graves.
- Lee Argus
We were each other's only link to the past... that was the strength of our bond, and also our weakness.
- Lisa Kleypas
It seemed important to figure out how much of the attraction I felt for Hardy came from now, as opposed to the past. If we had met now. for the first time, as strangers, would I have felt the same about him?
I couldn't have said for certain.
- Lisa Kleypas
In the past year I've gotten used to being cut down to size whenever I start acting too high and mighty. If you didn't keep me in line,I'd be damn well unmanageable. As it is, you're going to have a lot of work to do once they leave.
- Lisa Kleypas
She didn't want to know. She didn't want to feel sympathy for him. She didn't want to know this insistent urge to take him in her arms and offer comfort for things that had happened so long ago. It was all in the past, she reminded herself. He didn't need comfort or sympathy now, and he certainly didn't need any silly attempts of her to approach him.
- Lisa Kleypas
I may have been dead for the past hundred and fifty years, Susannah,...but that doesn't mean I don't know how people say good night. And generally, when people say good night, they keep their tongues to themselves.
- Meg Cabot
I've never enjoyed myself more than I have the past forty-eight hours, during which I've been trapped in a car with one of the worst drivers I've ever seen, run up the Spanish Steps and then down again so I could be on time to wait in line to perjuer myself at the American consulate. And I'd like to continue doing those sorts of thing with you on a regular basis for the foreseeable future.
- Meg Cabot
it's only by studying the mistakes of the past," Lucien
said mildly, "that we can even have a future
- Meg Cabot
Hours and days and months and years go by; the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know; but whatever the time gives us in which we live, we should therefore be content.
- Quintus Tullius Cicero
In the past ABC has made half-hearted efforts or, worse, cosmetic efforts, to do something about news and I wasn't certain about what their real aim was - nor am I now.
- Roone Arledge
I don't think the news department will have to lie down and play dead like it has in the past. By and large the network has been understanding, but then so have I.
- Roone Arledge
People tend to look on the beliefs of the past as being primitive and unintelligent, yet we are seeing more truth in the past every day.
- Jennifer L Armentrout
I'd always avoided confrontation in the past, but tihs guy was flipping my bitch switch like nothing else.
- Jennifer L Armentrout
I've always avoided confrontation in the past, but this guy was flipping my bitch switch like nothing else.
- Jennifer L Armentrout
Just to cover the increase in fuel costs over the past two years, American would have had to raise fares nearly $75 per round-trip ticket. During this time period, our average fare increased by only $15.
- Gerard Arpey
One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image.
- Timothy Garton Ash
You can't stop the future
You can't rewind the past
The only way to learn the secret
...is to press play.
- Jay Asher
I can't. You can't rewrite the past.
- Jay Asher
We remained at our encampment of this day until the morning of the 7th, when we descended ten miles lower down and encamped on a spot of ground where several thousand Indians had wintered during the past season.
- William Henry Ashley
I just got Kill Bill: Vol. 2. I've watched it like eight times in the past two months. I just love the scene at the end between David Carradine and Uma Thurman.
- Shawn Ashmore
Controversy and contention are weakening habits. If Satan can succeed in creating in us the pastime of arguing, quarreling, and contention, it is easier for him to bind us with heavier sins which can destroy our eternal lives. Anger is a poor substitute for self-mastery and compassionate service.
- Marvin J Ashton
They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.
- Isaac Asimov
It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research.
- Isaac Asimov
The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all.
- Isaac Asimov
Don't you see? It's Galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration - a stagnation!
- Isaac Asimov
You know, they just don't make big movie stars the way they used to, maybe because the system has changed, the studio system, but it's sad to see people like Jimmy Stewart go, all the giants of the past.
- Tom Atkins
He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.
- Kate Atkinson
Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.
- Brooks Atkinson
In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred,It is a paryer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present.
- Amelia Atwater Rhodes
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
- Margaret Atwood
All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.
- Margaret Atwood
While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
- Margaret Atwood
Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the pastthe past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
- Margaret Atwood
But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
- Margaret Atwood
I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.
- Margaret Atwood
As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.
- Margaret Atwood
So Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so muc.
- Margaret Atwood
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
- Thomas Carlyle
You list the dead. You tell the stories of the past. You write about the catastrophes and the massacres. What about the living, Finnikin? Who honors them?
- Melina Marchetta
Play me something that makes me feel;
This soul inside me is made of steel.
Brain is breathing, but heart's not beating
And, babe, I need you to make things real.
Walk inside me without silence,
Kill the past and change the tense.
Empty gnawing and the ache is soaring;
Take me places that make more sense.
- Melina Marchetta
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.
- W H Auden
To a father, when a child dies, the future dies; to a child when a parent dies, the past dies.
- Red Auerbach
How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.
- Saint Augustine Of Hippo
No one can lose either the past or the future - how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess?... It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived: and if this is all he has, he cannot lose what he does not have.
- Marcus Aurelius
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.
- Marcus Aurelius
Learn from the past, but don't live in the past.
- Steve Maraboli
Do not belong to the past dawns,but to the noons of future
- Sri Aurobindo
The past, present, and future, were all equally in gloom.
- Jane Austen
Her mind was all disorder. The past, present, future, every thing was terrible.
- Jane Austen
You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
- Jane Austen
Think only on the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure
- Jane Austen
The evils arising from the loss of her uncle were neither trifling nor likely to lessen; and when thought had been freely indulged, in contrasting the past and the present, the employment of mind and dissipation of unpleasant ideas which only reading could produce made her thankfully turn to a book.
- Jane Austen
My object then," replied Darcy, "was to show you, by every civility in my power, that I was not so mean as to resent the past; and I hoped to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill opinion, by letting you see that your reproofs had been attended to. How soon any other wishes introduced themselves I can hardly tell, but I believe in about half an hour after I had seen you.
- Jane Austen
Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
- Jane Austen
He has been marked by the past, and once that happens, nothing can be
done about it. Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on
happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.
- Paul Auster
Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance.
- Paul Auster
Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'.
- Paul Auster
Thank you.
It used to be knee length, but then I discovered that when I get angry I like to cut things.
I'm not allowed to have scissors any more.
It's still pretty lengthy, but I've been threatening to shave half of it for the past week and nobody seems to believe me...
I do it all myself though because I scream when I'm touched and that scares people.
- Emilie Autumn
Let us forget the past - this is the only way to be genuinely surprised.
- Steve Aylett
Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.
- Lauren Bacall
You realize yourself when you start reflecting - because I don't live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are - that you can't ignore it. But I don't look at scrapbooks.
- Lauren Bacall
We can start working with time, if you wish, till you can fly the past and the future. And then you will be ready to begin the most difficult, the most powerful, the most fun of all. You will be ready to BEGIN to fly up and know the meaning of kindness and of love
- Richard Bach
Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.
- Louise J Kaplan
One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
- Gaston Bachelard
What if all I'd ever known was how it had been for the past three years - me being an unwanted outsider in my own family?
I might have turned out like Aphrodite, and I might still be letting my parents control me because I was hoping desperately that I would be good enough, make them proud, so that some day they would really love me.
- P C Cast
Ancient mirror
Macick mirror
Shades of gray
Hidden
Forbidden
Within, away
Part the mist
Macick kissed
Call the fey
Reveal the past
The spell is cast
I save the day!
- P C Cast
Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
We each have a story. They did this to us. There was no outside aggressor. They wanted an Apocalypse. They wanted the end. And they made it happen. It was orchestrated - who got in, who didn't. There was a master list. We weren't on it. We were left here to die. They want to erase us, the past, but we can't let them.
- Julianna Baggott
There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you if you don't repeat it.
- Pearl Bailey
Out of the past come the standards for judging the present; standards in turn to be shaped by the practice of present-day dramatists into broader standards for the next generation.
- George P Baker
I don't really drink very much, although I have abused alcohol in the past.
- Daniel Baldwin
I went backwards and forwards over it until I was 22. And then in the past few years I began to say to myself, OK, look, I'm not messing around. This is something I want to attack, instead of thinking, I'll just see what happens with it.
- Christian Bale
The love of glory is like the bridge that Satan built across Chaos to pass from Hell to Paradise: glory links the past with the future across a bottomless abyss. Nothing to my son, except my name!
- Napoleon Bonaparte
If we could read the past histories of all our enemies we would disregard all hostility for them.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
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