I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.
I don’t think France is a racist country, I really don’t, but we do still have many problems with our immigrant past, and there’s a shame that goes with that, that works both ways, in the host and in the post-immigrant generation.
The past cannot be cured.
‘Movement is life;’ and it is well to be able to forget the past, and kill the present by continual change.
Life stuff happens. You get knocked down, and you get back up. That’s just always been my mentality. I’m not really fazed by anything. It’s in the past. There’s nothing I can really do about it now. You learn from it, and you move on.
Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but it’s pretty much the whole game today.
You can’t allow tradition to get in the way of innovation. There’s a need to respect the past, but it’s a mistake to revere your past.
Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other’s speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child – one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.
It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
Losers live in the past. Winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present toward the future.
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
We are not going back to the failed policies of the past. We are fighting for the middle class!
See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.
The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.
I think I pose some problems for Georges that he maybe hasn’t seen in the past.
See, what you’re meant to do when you have a mid-life crisis is buy a fast car, aren’t you? Well, I’ve always had fast cars. It’s not that. It’s the fear that you’re past your best. It’s the fear that the stuff you’ve done in the past is your best work.
When we’re rapping on these records, we’re either rapping about our past lives or things our people are going through right now in the struggle. It’s not necessarily what we’re going through ourselves.
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
Biodiversity starts in the distant past and it points toward the future.
The Iranian people, with regards to the policies of various American administrations in the past 30 years, are very worried. They don’t trust them.
I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.
Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.
To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.
Modern science says: ‘The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.’ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.
The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad.
Life is a blink. It really is, it zips right past you.
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.
So foolish is the heart of man that he ever puts his hope in the future, learning nothing from his past errors and fancying that tomorrow must be better than today.
The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.
The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have been wrong must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.
Yet consider now, whether women are not quite past sense and reason, when they want to rule over men.
You can’t live in the past.
Humans are the only creatures with the ability to dive deep in the sea, fly high in the sky, send instant messages around the globe, reflect on the past, assess the present and imagine the future.
I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.
My heroes and heroines are often unlikely people who are dragged into situations without meaning to become involved, or people with a past that has never quite left them. They are often isolated, introspective people, often confrontational or anarchic in some way, often damaged or secretly unhappy or incomplete.
Parents are like shuttles on a loom. They join the threads of the past with threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go.
God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
If you will work in co-operation, forgetting the past, burying the hatchet, you are bound to succeed.
Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.
Trying to sneak a fastball past Hank Aaron is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster.
There’s a big mistake that people make with history, which is to think that people in the past were just like us, but wearing crinolines. They lived in different worlds.
In the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask, ‘why don’t I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden,’ and they abandon their values.
I don’t have time to beat myself up over my fallible nature. Instead I use my energy to learn from my past and let it inform my future. It’s time to own all of our glory, mistakes, mess and light and be gentle to ourselves. Let’s be kind to our spirits and celebrate the truth of our hearts.
The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
I’ve never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don’t understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.
Look back, and smile on perils past.
One of the best ways to make yourself happy in the present is to recall happy times from the past. Photos are a great memory-prompt, and because we tend to take photos of happy occasions, they weight our memories to the good.
You can’t sit back, rest on laurels and think about the past – what the journey has been.
The best prophet of the future is the past.
No jealousy their dawn of love overcast, nor blasted were their wedded days with strife; each season looked delightful as it past, to the fond husband and the faithful wife.
I’d always been interested in Nigeria’s past.
Immunity to obsolescence is the only obsolescent-immune conceit of the past millennium.
