Quotes on Past

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there's always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future.

I feel George Wallace symbolizes something in the past which America has rejected.

Young men, trust God, and make the future bright with blessing. Old men, trust God, and magnify him for all the mercies of the past.

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.

This bloody past suggests to us that enemies cease hostilities only when they are battered enough to acknowledge that there is no hope in victory - and thus that further resistance means only useless sacrifice.

If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.

There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past.

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

I believe in pure jiu-jitsu. That's what I've done in the past.

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

So many amongst us live in the past rather than loving the present and building a brilliant future. Some people stay stuck for years over something they did or a failure they've experienced. Sad. A life is a terrible thing to waste.

I was always at my best when I was learning, when I was curious. When I had yet to see past the next horizon.

Time and space always change, but there is something which is eternal and changeless. For example, the world and time, past or future, nothing exists for us in sleep. But we exist. Let us try to find out that which is changeless and which always exists.

Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

Whatever has happened to you in your past has no power over this present moment, because life is now.

If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you're an ordinary female housewife, people say, 'This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it's not professional.'

We're our own worst enemy. You doubt yourself more than anybody else ever will. If you can get past that, you can be successful.

We have our own script. We have our own calendar. We represent the greatness of Africa's past. We also represent the worst of Africa's present, in terms of poverty. It is the best and the worst of African reality.