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Past Quotes

“It is sometimes said that because of our past we, as a people, expect too much and set our sights too high. That is not the way I see it. Rather it seems to me that throughout my life in politics our ambitions have steadily shrunk. Our response to disappointment has not been to lengthen our stride but to shorten the distance to be covered. But with confidence in ourselves and in our future what a nation we could be!”

People Way Said Sometimes Seems Past Nations Too Much Ambition Sight Distance Response Disappointment Covered Our Future Our Past Stride

Author:Margaret Thatcher

“The past is gained, secure, and on record.”

Past Records Secure

Book:The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 1845-1846

Source: The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 1845-1846

“The explorers of the past were great men and we should honour them. But let us not forget that their spirit lives on. It is still not hard to find a man who will adventure for the sake of a dream or one who will search, for the pleasure of searching, not for what he may find.”

Men Should May Stills Hard Dream Past Spirit Forget Pleasure Adventure Sake Great Men Exploration Honour Explorers Mt Everest

Book:High Adventure: Our Ascent of the Everest

Source: High Adventure: Our Ascent of the Everest

“The deeds we do, the words we say,Into still air they seem to fleet;We count them ever past;But they shall last -In the dread judgment theyAnd we shall meet.”

Stills Seems Lasts Past Air Judgment Deeds Dread

Author:John Keble

“It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.”

Persons Has Beens Past Remember Individual Lost Nations Memories Knowing Conception Denied Not Knowing Deprived Disabled Dealing With It

Author:Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

“Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White is remarkable for its truth-telling about two important issues concerning Alabama's past and present: the civil rights movement and immigration. These stories, rendered through the words and eyes of a young Latina girl who came from Argentina to Marion, Alabama, are made vivid and immediate through Weaver's highly accessible drawings and dialogue. This is a book-about maturation, family, education, and social change-every schoolchild, parent, and citizen should experience.”

“Past the village flowed the river, like time, like life itself, waiting for the swimmer to come again on his way to the climax of his adventurous life, and to the end for which he had been made.”

Way Made Ends Past Waiting Rivers Village Adventurous Climax Swimmer Adventurous Life

Book:I Heard the Owl Call My Name

Source: I Heard the Owl Call My Name

“Today, every principle of identity is affected by fashion, precisely because of its potential to revert all forms to non-origin and recurrence. Fashion is always retro, but always on the basis of the abolition of the passé (the past): the spectral death and resurrection of forms. Its proper actuality (its 'up-to-dateness', its 'relevance') is not a reference to the present, but an immediate and total recycling.”

Today Past Form Principles Fashion Identity Bases Affected Resurrection Relevance Abolition Recycling Actuality Retro Recurrence

Book:Symbolic Exchange and Death

Source: Symbolic Exchange and Death

“There is no comfort looking forth nor back, The present gives the lie to all her past.”

Giving Past Lying Comfort

Book:Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings

Source: Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings

“Everyone has a bookplate these days, and the collectors are after it. The fool and his bookplate are soon parted. To distribute one's ex libris is inanely to destroy the only significance it has, that of indicating the past or present ownership of the volume in which it is placed.”

Past Fool These Days Significance Ownership Volume Exes Collectors

Author:Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.”

Knows Should Trying May Art Past Vision Talent Havens Poet Make Sense Construction Unstable Where You Stand

Author:William Carlos Williams

“I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.”

Source: This Quiet Dust and Other Writings

“In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries.”

Long Past Actors Audience Century Theatre Collections Playwright Past Life Audience Of One

Book:Selected Works on the Pleasures of Reading

Source: Selected Works on the Pleasures of Reading

“Modern" poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are who could endure a century of transition ?”

Ends Past Wish Process Impossible Modern Century Products Endure Poetry Is Transition Extensions Romanticism Romantic Poetry Modern Poetry

Author:Randall Jarrell

“All cats can see futures, and see echoes of the past. We can watch the passage of creatures from the infinity of now, from all the worlds like ours, only fractionally different. And we follow them with our eyes, ghost things, and the humans see nothing.”

World Humans Different Eye Past Watches Creatures Cat Ghost Infinity Passages Echoes

Author:Neil Gaiman

“Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.”

Thinking Way Littles Whole Seems Past Water Consciousness Experience Depth Lakes Transparent Past Experiences

Book:Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce

Source: Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce

“it's a good idea to review past mistakes before committing new ones.”

Ideas Past Mistake Reviews Good Ideas Past Mistakes

Book:Warren Buffett on Business: Principles from the Sage of Omaha

Source: Warren Buffett on Business: Principles from the Sage of Omaha

“Beyond here lies nothin' But the mountains of the past”

Past Lying Mountain

Author:Bob Dylan

“There's no doubt that I really have a feeling for the theater. These past few days it has occurred to me to do a comedy whose chief characters are photographic enlargements. Those people we see in doorways. Newlyweds, sergeants, dead girls, an anonymous crowd full of mustaches and wrinkles. It should be terrible. If I focus it well, it will possess pathos without consolation. In the midst of those people I will place an authentic fairy.”

“The Mexican revolution was a break with the past to recover the past. We were trying to deny we had an Indian and a black and a Spanish past. The Mexican Revolution accepted all heritages. It allowed Mexico to be mestizo.”

Trying Past Black Break Revolution Deny Accepted Indian Heritage Mexico Mexican Over The Past Mexican Revolution

Author:Carlos Fuentes

“There's something about the American spirit - inherent in the American spirit -- we don't hang on to the past. We always move forward.... We are going to leave something better for our children - not just here in the United States, but all around the world.”

World Children States Past Moving Spirit United United States Our Children Moving Forward Around The World Inherent Something Better American Spirit

Author:Barack Obama

“The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron.”

Past Spirit Steps Mankind Masters Birth Slave Notion Visible Iron Reverse Savages Forefathers

Author:James G. Frazer

“There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.”

Author:Joyce Carol Oates

“The execution of William Bonin was not the traditional gas chamber of the past. That has been ruled cruel and unusual. Instead, we have something that seems very kind and benign and technical; the injection of chemicals, Nazi-style.”

Kind Has Beens Seems Past Style Traditional Gas Chemicals Unusual Execution Nazi Chamber Benign Injection Gas Chambers

Author:Jerry Brown

“In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.”

“Like all truly pure souls she [Chantal] quickly resigned herself to past faults, thought only of how to repair whatever harm they had done. "Of all my daughters, you are certainly the least bothered by scruples of conscience," Abbé Chevance used to say.... Even sin, once the will is detached and no longer nourishes it, withers and dies sterile. It is in the secret of intentions, like in a decomposing humus, in the dark forest of future sins, unpardoned sins, half dead, half living, that new poisons are distilled.”

Soul Done Past Used Dies Dark Sin Secret Half Pure Daughter Conscience Faults Intention Harm Forests Poison My Daughter Bothered Detached Resigned Scruples Pure Soul

Author:Georges Bernanos

“He who abhors and shuns the light of the Sun,He who refuses to behold with respect the living creation of God,He who leads the good to wickedness,He who makes the meadows waterless and the pastures desolate,He who lets fly his weapon against the innocent,An enemy of my faith, a destroyer of Thy principles is he, O Lord!”

Light Past Lord Enemy Principles Sun Creation Weapons Refuse Innocent Wickedness Meadows Destroyers Desolate Pastures

Author:Zoroaster

“No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural.”

Men Should Made Matter Past Law Natural Greater Creation Return Eternal All Things Claims Rhythm Decline Stem Empowered Natural Law

Book:Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy

Source: Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy

“It is obvious that the fascist mass pestilence, with its background of thousands of years, cannot be mastered with social measures corresponding to the past three hundred years. The discovery of the natural biological work democracy in international human intercourse is the answer to fascism. This will be no less true even if not one of the living sex-economists, orgone biophysicists or work democrats should live to see its general functioning and its victory over the irrationalism in social life.”

“Three days: Today, Tomorrow and Yesterday, I know, Yet if the past were cancelled within the here and now, And then the future hidden, I could regain that Day, Which I, before I was, had lived in God's own way.”

Ifs Knows Way Today Past Three Tomorrow Yesterday Now And Then Here And Now

Author:Angelus Silesius

“What men have thought about life in the past is less important than what you feel about it to-day.”

Men Feels Important Past

Book:Lifted Masks

Source: Lifted Masks

“Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?”

Thinking Past Remember Courses Paris

Author:Djuna Barnes

“In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.”

Age Past Acceptance Corruption Ruins Endurance Captured Depravity

Book:Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts

Source: Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts

“Contemporary Christian proclamation is faced with the question whether, when it demands faith from men and women, it expects them to acknowledge this mythical world picture from the past. If this is impossible, it has to face the question whether the New Testament proclamation has a truth that is independent of the mythical world picture, in which case it would be the task of theology to demythologize the Christian proclamation.”

“It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work.”

Thinking World Would Be Past Impossible Acceptance Demand Blind Mythology Resolve Sheer Testament New Testament Blind Acceptance

Author:Rudolf Bultmann

“Mid-summer ... when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.”

Source: H. P. LOVECRAFT äóñ The Ultimate Horror Collection: 60 Occult & Supernatural Mysteries in One Volume: The Greatest Spine-Chilling and Blood-Curdling Stories of Terror & Macabre: The Call of Cthulhu, The White Ship, The Dunwich Horror, At The Mountains Of Madness, The Whisperer in Darknessäó_

“Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber, Past the wan-mooned abysses of night, I have lived o'er my lives without number, I have sounded all things with my sight.”

Past Night Numbers All Things Sight Abyss Guarded Slumber Gateways Ghouls

Author:H. P. Lovecraft

“States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.”

States Past Happiness Form Forget Profound Wit Intense Enjoyment Intoxication Forget The Past

Author:Stefan Zweig

“The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.”

Men Doe Has Beens Art Past Opinion Share Building Periods Models Instinct Objectives Affected Works Of Art Historian Transformed Subjective Building Up Popular Opinion

Author:Georg Brandes

“The male is just a bundle of conditioned reflexes, is incapable of a mentally free response, is tied to his early conditioning, is determined completely by his past experiences. His earliest experiences are with his mother, and he is throughout his life tied to her. It never becomes completely clear to the male that he is not part of his mother, that he is him and she is her.”

Past Mother Clear Response Males Determined Tied Incapable Conditioning Bundles Reflexes Past Experiences

Book:SCUM Manifesto

Source: SCUM Manifesto

“(Carmine Crocco) A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty for his past offences, and subsequently became the most formidable guerilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side.”

Men Years Past Sides Leader Ten Army Chiefs Farms Comrade Formidable Offence Outlaw Deserted Amnesty Insurgent Bourbon Labourers

Book:Bandits

Source: Bandits

“Ever since Richard Nixon walloped George McGovern in the presidential election of 1972, political pundits have treated as a truism the proposition that liberals are out of step with the rest of the nation, and therefore all but unelectable outside the precincts of the Northeast -- give or take a college town here or a ski resort there. During the course of every presidential election for the past forty years now, Republicans have sought to wield the word liberal as if it were a six-gauge shotgun.”

Source: Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America's Most Important Ideals

“We postpone the finality of heartbreak by clinging to hope. Though this might be acceptable during early or transitional stages of grief, ultimately it is no way to live. We need both hands free to embrace life and accept love, and that's impossible if one hand has a death grip on the past.”

Ifs Way Needs Hands Might Past Grief Accepting Impossible Stage Embrace Acceptable Way To Live Clinging Finality Embrace Life Stages Of Grief

Author:Kristin Armstrong

“Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.”

Needs Looks Lasts Past

Author:Peter Ackroyd

“The riches of the soul are stored up in its memory. this is the test of character, not whether a man follows the daily fashion, but whether the past is alive in his present.”

Men Soul Character Past Memories Alive Fashion Tests Riches Test Of Character

Book:Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion

Source: Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion

“The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.”

World Past Activity Civilized Residents

Book:Running Wild

Source: Running Wild

“Ye come and go incessant; we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this.”

Past Safe Comes And Goes Incessant

Book:Delphi Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Illustrated)

Source: Delphi Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Illustrated)

“A nature wise With finding in itself the types of all, With watching from the dim verge of the time What things to be are visible in the gleams Thrown forward on them from the luminous past, Wise with the history of its own frail heart, With reverence and sorrow, and with love, Broad as the world, for freedom and for man.”

Men World Heart Character Past Wise Type Sorrow Findings Visible Thrown Broads Reverence Luminous Verge Frail Gleam

Book:Miscellaneous poems. Memorial verses. Sonnets. I-XXVII. L'Envoi. Vision of Sir Launfal

Source: Miscellaneous poems. Memorial verses. Sonnets. I-XXVII. L'Envoi. Vision of Sir Launfal

“Ours is a golden age of minorities. At no time in the past have dissident minorities felt so much at home and had so much room to throw their weight around. They speak and act as if they were "the people," and what they abominate most is the dissent of the majority.”

People Ifs Home Age Past Speak Felt Rooms Weight Majority Golden Minorities Dissent Golden Age Dissidents

Book:In our time

Source: In our time

“While you have a future do not live too much in contemplation of your past: unless you are content to walk backward the mirror is a poor guide.”

Past Walks Poor Too Much Mirrors Guides Contemplation Our Past Your Past

Book:Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)

Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)