Quotes on Past

Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast.

Your past is not your potential. In any hour you can choose to liberate the future.

I've always been more interested in the future than in the past.

I cannot write about the past unless I go where history happened. Some make very good armchair historians, I'm not one of them. If you're going to inhabit someone else's world, the very least you can do is to spend a little time in it.

We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.

For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them: by understanding the present through the lens of the past.

Certainly, I've never wanted to live on past achievements.

I think that all human systems require continuous renewal. They rigidify. They get stuff in the joints. They forget what they cared about. The forces against it are nostalgia and the enormous appeal of having things the way they always have been, appeals to a supposedly happy past. But we've got to move on.

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

Exultation is the going Of an inland soul to sea Past the houses, past the headlands Into deep eternity! Bred as we, among the mountains Can the sailor understand The divine intoxication Of the first league out from land?

Nothing in the past is as powerful as what we choose to do in the present moment.

Freedom is control in your own life. I have more control now than in the past, and I'm learning the value of saying no. That's very important.

Forgive me for startling you with the impetuosity of my sentiments, my dear Scarlett—I mean, my dear Mrs. Kennedy. It cannot have escaped your notice that for some time past the friendship I have had in my heart for you has ripened into a deeper feeling, a feeling more beautiful, more pure, more sacred. Dare I name it you? Ah! It is love which makes me so bold!

Unlike science, creationism cannot predict anything, and it cannot provide satisfactory answers about the past.

Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.

Dreams have consequences. There is no turning back. A revolution is not a painless march to the gates of freedom and justice. It is a struggle between rage and hope, between the temptation to destroy and the desire to build. Its temperament is desperate. It is a tormented response to the past, to all that has happened, the recalled and unrecalled injustices - for the memory of a revolution reaches much further back than the memory of its protagonists.

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.

When we see the secret beauty of anyone, including ourselves, we see past our judgment and fear into the core of who we truly are - not an entrapped self but the radiance of goodness.

I hope that you have re-read the Constitution of the United States in these past few weeks. Like the Bible, it ought to be read again and again.