Quotes on Past

It's hard to be clear about who you are when you are carrying around a bunch of baggage from the past. I've learned to let go and move more quickly into the next place.

Imagination places the future world for us either above or below or in reincarnation. We dream of travels throughout the universe: is not the universe within us? We do not know the depths of our spirit. The mysterious path leads within. In us, or nowhere, lies eternity with its worlds, the past and the future.

I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.

I remember the past, and I learn from it. I rejoice and celebrate in the present, and I re-imagine the future. Now is the moment that never ends.

We either allow our past to keep interfering with our optimal expression of love and happiness, or we can move beyond our past with renewed passion for life

Whoever touches the life of the child touches the most sensitive point of a whole which has roots in the most distant past and climbs toward the infinite future.

From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.

There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.

The fact that war belongs to the past, does not mean it has to be part of the future.

It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.

It is compassion, then, that is the best protection; it is also, as the great masters of the past have always known, the source of all healing.

I am neither in the past, nor avant-garde. My style follows life.

Not much longer shall we have time for reading lessons of the past. An inexorable present calls us to the defense of a great future.

The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.

The humiliation I go through/when I think of my past/can only be described as grace./We are created by being destroyed.

Sometimes I think I can expiate all my past and future sins through the aching of my bones.

England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same.

I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past

Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich.

No study has taken so much of human energy, whether in times past or present, as the study of the soul, of God, and of human destiny.

Pleasure must succeed to pleasure, else past pleasure turns to pain