Quotes on Past

Consider all the past as nothing, and say, like David: Now I begin to love my God.

The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation.

In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don't think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it.

I was raised in an Irish-American home in Detroit where assimilation was the uppermost priority. The price of assimilation and respectability was amnesia. Although my great-grandparents were victims of the Great Hunger of the 1840's, even though I was named Thomas Emmet Hayden IV after the radical Irish nationalist exile Thomas Emmet, my inheritance was to be disinherited. My parents knew nothing of this past, or nothing worth passing on.

We all spend so much time worrying about the future that the present moment slips right out of our hands. And so all we have left is retrospection and anticipation, retrospection and anticipation. In which case what's left to recall but past anticipation? What's left to anticipate but future retrospection?

Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.

How can I know anything about the past or the future, when the light of the Beloved shines only Now.

Of this alone, even god is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been.

The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters

Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

But all lost things are in the angels' keeping, Love; No past is dead for us, but only sleeping, Love; The years of Heaven with all earth's little pain Make Good Together there we can begin again, In babyhood.

It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.

Since there my past life lies, why alter it?

I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.

If you're determined to think of yourself as limited, fearful, vulnerable, or scarred by past experience, know only that you have chosen to do so. The opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available.

I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty

The past resembles the future more than one drop of water resembles another.

I believe the single most significant decision I can make on a day-to-day basis is my choice of attitude. It is more important than my past, my education, my bankroll, my successes or failures, fame or pain, what other people think of me or say about me, my circumstances, or my position.

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past or the future.

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future