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Past Quotes

“If your primary focus is to get over your health problems or get past a relationship crisis so that you can return to your former life and old patterns- that is, get back to business as usual-you are not really living. The distinction is paradoxical and sometimes subtle. It's the difference between walking through your life on your way to somewhere, and walking as your life. Even if you believe that where you want to get is extremely important, that destination is secondary. Your immediate experience is what really matters. It is your life.”

IfsWayWantLifeBelieveImportantSometimesMatterProblemPastDifferencesFocusReturnWalkingCrisisPatternsFormerPrimariesDistinctionSubtleOver YouDestinationGet BackUsualGet OverIf You BelieveParadoxicalHealth ProblemsReally LivingFormer Life
Author:Richard Moss
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“The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible... to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.”

MatterPastFiveTravelEuropeEdgesTinyInvisibleAliensCanadaSurroundContinentsTravelerEnteringWhalesProvincesSlippingJonahIsleBelle
Book:The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society
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“Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger.”

PeopleWorldRealMatterPastLiteratureIndividualCommunityDealsRaceFictionGreaterEffectsDangerCivilizationConcernImportanceScience FictionBranchesReal WorldTechnologicalTechnological Change
Book:Road to Science Fiction 2
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“Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working well enough (often admirably); a jury-rigged set of adaptations built of curious parts made available by past histories in different contexts. A world optimally adapted to current environments is a world without history, and a world without history might have been created as we find it. History matters; it confounds perfection and proves that current life transformed its own past.”

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Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“Stop watering things that were never meant to grow in your life. Water what works, what's good, what's right. Stop playing around with those dead bones and stuff you can't fix, its over...leave it alone! You're coming into a season of greatness. If you water what's alive and divine, you will see harvest like you've never seen before. Stop wasting water on dead issues, dead relationships, dead people, a dead past. No matter how much you water concrete, you can't grow a garden.”

PeopleIfsMatterPastGrowsStuffWaterIssuesAliveGreatnessDivineLike YouGardenSeasonsBonesConcreteHarvestDead PeoplePlaying Around
Author:T. D. Jakes
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“Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational.”

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Book:Democracy and Education: Top American Authors
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“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.”

MenShouldMadeMatterPastLawNaturalGreaterCreationReturnEternalAll ThingsClaimsRhythmDeclineStemEmpoweredNatural Law
Book:Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy
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“We see many instances of cities going down like sinking ships to their destruction. There have been such wrecks in the past and there surely will be others in the future, caused by the wickedness of captains and crews alike. For these are guilty men, whose sin is supreme ignorance of what matters most.”

MenHas BeensMatterPastSinCitiesIgnoranceDestructionSupremeShipsGuiltyInstanceWhat MattersCaptainsCrewWickednessWrecksSinking
Book:Plato's Statesman
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“I spend a lot of time loathing the sentences that I put down on the page. Once I'm past that phase, it doesn't really matter what the routine is (coffee shop, someone else's house, my dining room table), I'm pretty fast. I go back to the start of whatever I'm working on, every half hour or so, and revise my way back to where I left off. I have my headphones on, I'm checking email, I look at Twitter and Tumblr, and drink a lot of coffee. I need a lot of distraction to work.”

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Author:Kelly Link
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“Generally speaking, I am not interested in the future and don't believe in it. First, I guess it is true that I don't trust the future, but, more to the point, I don't even trust the "myself" of tomorrow, nor, for that matter, of the day after. Basically, all I know, and all I am capable of understanding, is the "me" that is here, now, the "me" that has dragged his past with him to this point.”

KnowsFirstsBelieveMatterPastUnderstandingTomorrowCapableDon't BelieveNot InterestedDon't Trust
Author:Yohji Yamamoto
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“The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.”

WayMindHumansMeanDoeMatterShowsBodyPastCultureImaginationAnimalCenturyCreaturesToolsEternityPlantBoardsParadiseExploring20th CenturyPsychedelicDoorwaysNostalgicMushroomsPsychedelic ExperienceWiringSymbiosis
Author:Terence McKenna
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“Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable.”

LongDoeMatterFactsRunningAgePastLostForceExistenceClassPromiseSucceedDemandFunctionStructureObjectivesFraudArtificialStableLong RunsPersistRulingTotalitarianismDisbeliefClingingSchizophreniaAlterationsObjective Truth
Author:George Orwell
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“Love is friendship that has caught fire. ... Love is content with the present, it hopes for the future, and it doesn't brood over the past. It's the day-in and day-out chronicle of irritations, problems, compromises, small disappointments, big victories and working toward common goals. If you have love in your life it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don't have it, no matter what else there is, it's not enough.”

IfsMatterEnoughProblemBigsPastGoalLove IsCommonFireVictoryNo Matter WhatCaughtDisappointmentCompromiseGreat MenOver The PastIrritationChroniclesHope For The FutureWedding CeremonyCommon Goal
Book:Wake Up and Smell the Coffee!: Advice, Wisdom, and Uncommon Good Sense
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“I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men.”

MenShouldMindBelieveHas BeensStillsImportantMatterSeemsAgePastEnergyWealthMiddleConcernConcernedEconomicsDebateCeasePrimariesMeaninglessControversyExclusiveMiddle AgesTheologicalGrown ManPolitics And Economics
Author:Arthur C. Clarke
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“Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.”

PeopleYearsLooksKindMeanMadeMatterWholePastFacesActorsPowerfulFiveSubjectsSittingTwentiesPhotographDeeperDecadesFive YearsClothingsPortraitsSentimentalInventingTwenty FiveMorbidPicture Taking
Book:Mao II
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