Quotes on Past

We should keep in mind that it is easy to concoct stories explaining the past or to become confident about dubious scenarios of the future. We should view both explanations and prophecies with skepticism.

Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.

Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past_x000D_ _x000D_ Into different lives, or into any future;_x000D_ _x000D_ You are not the same people who left that station_x000D_ _x000D_ Or who will arrive at any terminus,_x000D_ _x000D_ While the narrowing rails slide together behind you.

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.

The longest journeyIs the journey inwards.Of him who has chosen his destiny, Who has started upon his quest For the source of his being.

All the particular moral judgments we intuitively make are likely to derive from discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions, or from customs necessary for the survival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant past.

I don’t believe in “laying to rest” the past. There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive.

Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.

All too often, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past - by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths.

When you are fully present with everyone you meet, you relinquish the conceptual identity you made for them - your interpretation of who they are and what they did in the past - and are able to interact without the egoic movements of desire and fear. Attention, which is alert stillness, is the key.

Schools are the single largest lever of mobility in this country. When we commit to creating and enforcing laws that acknowledge the injustice of the past, we open up the possibility of using schools as a means of reducing inequality.

Last night you left me and slept your own deep sleep. Tonight you turn and turn. I say, 'You and I will be together till the Universe dissolves.' You mumble back things you thought of when you were drunk.

It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.

We (Muslims) have no right, in our present misery, to boast of past glories. But we must realise that it was the negligence of the Muslims - and not any deficiency in the teachings of Islam - that caused our present decay.

Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.

The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.

Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.

Who doesn’t respect and value his past, is not worth the honour of the present, and has no right to a future

Hanging onto resentment is letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head.

You have risen with all power in Your hands. You have given me a second chance. Hallelujah, hallelujah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not going back, I’m moving ahead. Here to declare to You my past is over in You. All things are made new, surrendered my life to Christ. I’m moving, moving forward.