Past Quotes - Page 29

• There is no comfort looking forth nor back, The present gives the lie to all her past.

  Emma Lazarus

  Lying, Giving, Comfort

  Emma Lazarus (2002). “Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings”, p.47, Broadview Press

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• What men have thought about life in the past is less important than what you feel about it to-day.

  Susan Glaspell

  Men, Important, Feels

  Susan Glaspell (1912). “Lifted Masks”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• All cats can see futures, and see echoes of the past. We can watch the passage of creatures from the infinity of now, from all the worlds like ours, only fractionally different. And we follow them with our eyes, ghost things, and the humans see nothing.

  Neil Gaiman

  Cat, Eye, Echoes

  "Dream Country (The Sandman, Book 3)". Book sub-series by Neil Gaiman, July – October 1990.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.

  Hannah Arendt

  Mean, Goal, Progress

  Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.71, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relics of the giants of the past.

  Isaac Asimov

  Giants, Relics, Superstitious

  Isaac Asimov (1984). “Second foundation”, Del Rey

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.

  J. G. Ballard

  World, Residents, Civilized

  J. G. Ballard (2014). “Running Wild”, p.62, Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Credit and debt keep us fixated on the past and the future.

  Mark Sundeen

  Credit, Debt

  4 Copy quote

• He who abhors and shuns the light of the Sun,He who refuses to behold with respect the living creation of God,He who leads the good to wickedness,He who makes the meadows waterless and the pastures desolate,He who lets fly his weapon against the innocent,An enemy of my faith, a destroyer of Thy principles is he, O Lord!

  Zoroaster

  Light, Enemy, Principles

  169 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Three days: Today, Tomorrow and Yesterday, I know, Yet if the past were cancelled within the here and now, And then the future hidden, I could regain that Day, Which I, before I was, had lived in God's own way.

  Angelus Silesius

  Yesterday, Three, Today

  "Cherubinischer Wandersmann". Book by Angelus Silesius (1657) translated by Julia Bilger, 1944.

  27 Copy quote

  Show source

• Contemporary Christian proclamation is faced with the question whether, when it demands faith from men and women, it expects them to acknowledge this mythical world picture from the past. If this is impossible, it has to face the question whether the New Testament proclamation has a truth that is independent of the mythical world picture, in which case it would be the task of theology to demythologize the Christian proclamation.

  Rudolf Bultmann

  Christian, Independent, Men

  38 Copy quote

• Mid-summer ... when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Summer, Nature, Echoes

  H. P. Lovecraft (2016). “H. P. LOVECRAFT äóñ The Ultimate Horror Collection: 60 Occult & Supernatural Mysteries in One Volume: The Greatest Spine-Chilling and Blood-Curdling Stories of Terror & Macabre: The Call of Cthulhu, The White Ship, The Dunwich Horror, At The Mountains Of Madness, The Whisperer in Darknessäó_”, p.6, e-artnow

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The reverberation often exceeds through silence the sound that sets it off; the reaction occasionally outdoes by way of repose the event that stimulated it; and the past not uncommonly takes a while to happen, and some long time to figure out.

  Ken Kesey

  Long, Silence, Sound

  Ken Kesey (2006). “Sometimes a Great Notion”, p.485, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The male is just a bundle of conditioned reflexes, is incapable of a mentally free response, is tied to his early conditioning, is determined completely by his past experiences. His earliest experiences are with his mother, and he is throughout his life tied to her. It never becomes completely clear to the male that he is not part of his mother, that he is him and she is her.

  Valerie Solanas

  Mother, Males, Determined

  Valerie Solanas (1971). “SCUM manifesto”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• (Carmine Crocco) A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty for his past offences, and subsequently became the most formidable guerilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side.

  Eric Hobsbawm

  Army, Men, Years

  Eric J. Hobsbawm (1985). “Bandits”

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Needs, Looks, Lasts

  1992 English Music, ch.19.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The riches of the soul are stored up in its memory. this is the test of character, not whether a man follows the daily fashion, but whether the past is alive in his present.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Fashion, Memories, Character

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1976). “Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion”, p.162, Macmillan

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• While you have a future do not live too much in contemplation of your past: unless you are content to walk backward the mirror is a poor guide.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Mirrors, Too Much, Poor

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.1221, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the Universe had appeared to me more interesting.

  Marcel Proust

  Girl, Women, Interesting

  Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.648, Wordsworth Editions

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• When one becomes for an instant one's former self, that is to say different from what one has been for some time past, one's sensibility, being no longer dulled by habit, receives from the slightest stimulus vivid impressions which make everything that has preceded them fade into insignificance, impressions to which, because of their intensity, we attach ourselves with the momentary enthusiasm of a drunkard.

  Marcel Proust

  Self, Different, Vivid

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.537, Modern Library

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We see many instances of cities going down like sinking ships to their destruction. There have been such wrecks in the past and there surely will be others in the future, caused by the wickedness of captains and crews alike. For these are guilty men, whose sin is supreme ignorance of what matters most.

  Plato

  Ignorance, Men, What Matters

  Plato (1952). “Plato's Statesman”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system. And because we have tolerated our past and present evils, international affairs are poisoned and law and justice have disappeared from them.

  Jawaharlal Nehru

  Law, Evil, Justice

  Jawaharlal Nehru, M. Chalapathi Rau, H. Y. Sharada Prasad, Bal Ram Nanda (1972). “Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru: Advisory Board: M. Chalapathi Rau, H. Y. Sharada Prasad, and B. R. Nanda; General Editor: S. Gopal”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• To be sure, the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish.

  Sigmund Freud

  Dream, Taken, Wish

  Sigmund Freud (2016). “THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS - The Royal Road to the Unconscious: Rules of Dream Interpretation: The Dream as a Fulfillment of a Wish, Distortion in Dreams, The Method of Dream Interpretation, The Sources of Dreams & The Psychology of the Dream Activities”, p.439, e-artnow

  6 Copy quote

  Show source