Past quotes
10.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'"
"Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars...The stakes are immense, the task colossal the time is short. But we may hope- we must hope- that man's own creation, man's own genius, will not destroy him."
"You can't escape the past in Paris, and yet what's so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn't seem to burden."
"I think the economic empowerment of women that has been growing over the past decade is at the 'inflection point' with this global recession. Women are, we believe, the solution for their families in their ability to go out and increase household income."
"For this equilibrium now in sight, let us trust that mankind, as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past, will find for itself a new code of ethics, common to all, made of tolerance, of courage, and of faith in the Spirit of men."
"I never look back, darling. It distracts from the now."
"Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary."
"Now I am past all comforts here, but prayer."
"I've read about 80 books a year for the past 50 years. I come from cultural breeding. I don't have a cellphone. When you spend all your time checking your cellphone messages, or updating your Facebook (of course I don't have a Facebook page) then you don't have any time for reading."
"To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future."
"The Great Morning which is for all, rises in the East."
"And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods."
"You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it."
"Baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come."
"Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings."
"There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves"
"Keep your life in a positive perspective. We are not defined by our pasts"
"Much of traditional magic takes place by the light of the Moon. In the night world we are closer to the unconscious, the hidden, that which has yet to be made manifest, that which is suppressed and as yet realized. Past, present, and future are simultaneously one in the realm of the unconscious. Night is when this world and the other world can meet."
"Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past."
"We are here for what amounts to a few/hours,/a day at most./We feel around making sense of the terrain,/our own new limbs,/Bumping up against a herd of bodies/until one becomes home./Moments sweep past. The grass bends/then learns again to stand."
