Past Quotes - Page 19

• In history, we are concerned with what has been and what is; in philosophy, however, we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or to the future, but with that which is, both now and eternally — in short, with reason.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Philosophy, Reason, Concerned

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hugh Barr Nisbet, Duncan Forbes (1975). “Lectures on the Philosophy of World History”, p.171, Cambridge University Press

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• Various epochs of the past have had their own characteristic struggles and interests. Each of these great epochs has left behind itself a kind of cultural deposit, like a geologic stratum. These deposits have found their way into educational institutions in the form of studies, distinct courses of study, distinct types of schools.

  John Dewey

  Educational, Struggle, School

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education: Top American Authors”, p.187, 谷月社

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• Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today -- that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.

  Virginia Woolf

  Marriage, Memories, Writing

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• Youth, hope, and love: To build a new life on a ruined life, To make the future fairer than the past, And make the past appear a troubled dream.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Dream, And Love, New Life

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Illustrated)”, p.895, Delphi Classics

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• Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Writing, Milton, Century

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1888). “Longfellow's Days: The Longfellow Prose Birthday Book : Extracts from the Journals and Letters of H. W. Longfellow”

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• Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.

  Bill Gates

  Years, Two, Spam

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• I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.

  William Styron

  Book, Writing, Two

  William Styron (1993). “This Quiet Dust and Other Writings”, Vintage

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• It is sometimes said that because of our past we, as a people, expect too much and set our sights too high. That is not the way I see it. Rather it seems to me that throughout my life in politics our ambitions have steadily shrunk. Our response to disappointment has not been to lengthen our stride but to shorten the distance to be covered. But with confidence in ourselves and in our future what a nation we could be!

  Margaret Thatcher

  Disappointment, Distance, Ambition

  The Lady's Not For Turning, delivered 10 October 1980, Conservative Party Conference, Brighton

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• The explorers of the past were great men and we should honour them. But let us not forget that their spirit lives on. It is still not hard to find a man who will adventure for the sake of a dream or one who will search, for the pleasure of searching, not for what he may find.

  Edmund Hillary

  Dream, Adventure, Men

  Sir Edmund Hillary (2013). “High Adventure: Our Ascent of the Everest”, p.6, Roli Books Private Limited

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• The deeds we do, the words we say,Into still air they seem to fleet;We count them ever past;But they shall last -In the dread judgment theyAnd we shall meet.

  John Keble

  Air, Deeds, Lasts

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• Past the village flowed the river, like time, like life itself, waiting for the swimmer to come again on his way to the climax of his adventurous life, and to the end for which he had been made.

  Margaret Craven

  Rivers, Adventurous Life, Waiting

  Margaret Craven (1973). “I Heard the Owl Call My Name”

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• Today, every principle of identity is affected by fashion, precisely because of its potential to revert all forms to non-origin and recurrence. Fashion is always retro, but always on the basis of the abolition of the passé (the past): the spectral death and resurrection of forms. Its proper actuality (its 'up-to-dateness', its 'relevance') is not a reference to the present, but an immediate and total recycling.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Fashion, Identity, Principles

  Jean Baudrillard (1993). “Symbolic Exchange and Death”, p.88, SAGE

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• Everyone has a bookplate these days, and the collectors are after it. The fool and his bookplate are soon parted. To distribute one's ex libris is inanely to destroy the only significance it has, that of indicating the past or present ownership of the volume in which it is placed.

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Fool, Ownership, Volume

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• O cease! must hate and death return, Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, Oh, might it die or rest at last!

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Hate, Men, World

  'Hellas' (1822) l. 1096

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• Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Thinking, Lakes, Water

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1931). “Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”

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• The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.

  Hannah Arendt

  Different, Treasure, Speak

  "Martin Heidegger at Eighty". "Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays". Book by Michael Murray, p. 294, 1978.

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• Ours is a golden age of minorities. At no time in the past have dissident minorities felt so much at home and had so much room to throw their weight around. They speak and act as if they were "the people," and what they abominate most is the dissent of the majority.

  Eric Hoffer

  Home, People, Age

  Eric Hoffer (1977). “In our time”, McNally & Loftin Publishers

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• Beyond here lies nothin' But the mountains of the past

  Bob Dylan

  Lying, Mountain

  Song: Beyond Here Lies Nothin', Album: Together Through Life, 2009

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• There's no doubt that I really have a feeling for the theater. These past few days it has occurred to me to do a comedy whose chief characters are photographic enlargements. Those people we see in doorways. Newlyweds, sergeants, dead girls, an anonymous crowd full of mustaches and wrinkles. It should be terrible. If I focus it well, it will possess pathos without consolation. In the midst of those people I will place an authentic fairy.

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  Girl, Character, Wrinkles

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• There's something about the American spirit -– inherent in the American spirit -- we don't hang on to the past. We always move forward.... We are going to leave something better for our children –- not just here in the United States, but all around the world.

  Barack Obama

  Children, Moving, United States

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• The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron.

  James G. Frazer

  Iron, Savages, Steps

  "The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion". Book by James G. Frazer, 1890.

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• In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.

  Pauline Kael

  Art, Zest, Giving

  "A Bad Dream/A Masterpiece". Review of "The Moon in the Gutter" on September 19, 1983. "State of the Art". Book by Pauline Kael, p. 48, 1985.

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• I have tried to be impartial, though I know that a man's past always colors his views, and that nothing else is so irritating as impartiality.

  Will Durant

  Men, Views, Color

  "The Story of Civilization Part VI the Reformation". Book by Will Durant and Ariel Durant, 1957.

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• No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Men, Law, Matter

  Wilhelm Reich (1960). “Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy”

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• It is obvious that the fascist mass pestilence, with its background of thousands of years, cannot be mastered with social measures corresponding to the past three hundred years. The discovery of the natural biological work democracy in international human intercourse is the answer to fascism. This will be no less true even if not one of the living sex-economists, orgone biophysicists or work democrats should live to see its general functioning and its victory over the irrationalism in social life.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Sex, Discovery, Years

  "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" by Wilhelm Reich, (Preface to the Third Edition), August 1942.

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