past

People who are always praising the past And especially the times of faith as best Ought to go and live in the Middle Ages And be burnt at the stake as witches and sages.

—Smith, Stevie (Florence Margaret)

Porque alla¤   los espan‹  oles y las otras naciones†como tienen historias divinas y humanas, saben por ellas cua¤  ndo empezaron a reinar sus Reyes y los ajenos†todo esto y mucho ma¤  s saben por sus libros. Empero vosotros, que carece¤  is de ellos, Que¤   memoria tene¤  is de vuestras antiguallas?, Quie¤  n fue el primero de nuestros Incas? Over there Spaniards and other nations know from their divine and human history when their Kings and other peoples' Kings began their reigns† Their books teach them all of this, and much more. But you, who have no books, what memories do you have of your ancient past? Who was our first Inca?

—Garcilaso de laVega, Inca

Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

—Thomas, R(onald) S(tuart)

Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow we find more and more of the random element in the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if therandomelement decreasesthearrow pointstowards the past† I shall usethe phrase'time's arrow'to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space.

—Eddington, SirArthur Stanley

   One usually understands the art of the past by applying the conventions of the present thus misunderstanding the art of the past.

—LeWitt, Sol

To begin to live in the present, we must first atone forour past and be finished with it, and we can onlyatone for it by suffering, by extraordinary, unceasing exertion.

—Chekhov, Anton

   Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedesbeforeus.It eludedusthen, but that's no matteröto-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further† And one fine morning† So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

—Fitzgerald, F(rancis) Scott Key

The present is burthened too much with the past.

—Hawthorne, Nathaniel

We cannot do without the past in solving the architectural problems of our own day.

—Poelzig, Hans

Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a wordöthe men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.

—Larkin, Philip Arthur

Les enfants n'ont ni passe¤   ni avenir, et, ce qui ne nous arrive gue'  re, ils jouissent du pre¤  sent. Children have neither past nor future. They live in the present, something which rarely happens to us.

—La Bruye'  re,Jean de

She was cut off fromthe past and therefore did not live in the present. But suddenly, as she stood close against a pine tree and breathed in its sharp, bitter scent, a clear space opened to her childhood, as though a wind had sprung fromthesea, clearing a mist.It wasnot a memory from the past, it was the past itself, as alive, as real; and she knew that she and the child of forty years ago were the same person.

—Thomas, D(onald) M(itchell)

I had learned that if one cannot call a country to heel like a dog, neither can one dismiss the past with a smile in an easygushof feeling, saying: Icould not help it,Iamalsoa victim.

—Lessing, Doris May ne¤  e Tayler

  The dark-lit stream has drowned the Future and the Past.

—Thomas, (Philip) Edward

Mientras en Norteame¤  rica la colonizacio¤  n deposito¤   los ge¤  rmenes de un esp|¤ritu y una econom|¤a que se plasmaban entonces en Europa y a los cuales pertenec|¤a el porvenir, a la Ame¤  rica espan‹  ola trajo los efectos y los me¤  todos de un esp|¤ritu y una econom|¤a que declinaban ya y a los cuales no pertenec|¤a sino el pasado. Whereas in North America colonization planted the seeds of the spirit and economy then growing in Europe

—Maria¤ t egui,Jose¤   Carlos

The West has not lived through totalitarianism, with a single ideology for 70 years.We are escaping from the burden of the past, and onlyafter we have done that will we be ready to integrate with Europeöand Europe needs Russia.

—Yeltsin, Boris

The Aboriginal writer is a Janus-type figure with one face turned to the past and the other to the future while existing ina postmodern, multicultural Australia inwhich he or she must fight for cultural space.

—Narogin, Mudrooroo formerly  Colin Jackson

L'architecture est le miroir me"  me de la vie. Il n'est que de jeter les yeux sur des e¤  difices pour sentir la pre¤  sence du passe¤  , l'esprit d'un lieu; ils sont le reflet de la socie¤  te¤  . Architecture is the very mirror of life.You only have to cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society.

—Pei, I(eoh) M(ing)

And right action is freedom From past and future also.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

This is the use of memory: For liberationönot less of love but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

I want a future that will live up to my past.

—Bennett, Alan

  Never let success hide its emptiness from you; achievement its nothingness; toil its desolation. Keep alivetheincentivetopushonfurther, that pain inthesoul that drives us beyond ourselves. Do not look back, and do not dream about the future either. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward, your destiny are here and now.

—Hammarskjo«  ld, Dag HjalmarAgne Carl

A wise nation preserves its records, gathers up its muniments, decorates the tombs of its illustrious dead, repairs its great public structures, and fosters national pride and love of country, by perpetual references to the sacrifices and glories of the past.

—Howe,Joseph

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

—Butler, Samuel

Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present: fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.

—Lewis, C(live) S(taples)

There, I believed, lay the greatest secrets of the past yet preserved inour world of today.Ihad cometotheturn of the road; and for better or worse I chose the forest path. 319

—Fawcett, Percy Harrison

Education is impossible without love, without loving a few of the great men of the past.

—Desbiens,Jean-Paul

History is past politics, and politics is present history.

—Freeman, Edward Augustus

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.

—Ackroyd, Peter

I do not intend to prejudge the past.

—Whitelaw,William Stephen Ian, 1st Viscount

One of the reasons why old people make so many journeys into the past isto satisfy themselves that it isstill there.

—Blythe, Ronald George

It isnot oftenthat nationslearnfromthepastöevenrarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it. For the lessons of historical experience, as of personal experience, are contingent. They teach the consequences ofcertain actions, but theycannot forcea recognition of comparable situations.

—Kissinger, HenryAlfred

Build thee more stately mansions,O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past!

—Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Many a woman has a past, but I am told that she has at least a dozen, and that they all fit.

—Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills

Like most of those who study history, Napoleon learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

—Taylor, A(lan) J(ohn) P(ercivale)

And if youare wise you will never pity thepast for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

—Fowles,John Robert

What can one do with the past? Forgive it. Let it enter into you in peace.

—Murray, Les(lie Allan)

We are always acting on what just finished happening. It happened at least1/30th of a second ago. We think we're inthe present, but wearen't.The present we know is onlya movie of the past.

—Kesey, Ken Elton

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

—Nabokov,Vladimir

Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.

—Nabokov,Vladimir

Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual, Here the past and future Are conquered, and reconciled.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

The alcohol made the present enough, it held her in its golden hand, where past and future were comprehended, where nothing mattered, nothing was lost, where everything could be known and forgiven, where she herself could be whole at last.

—Gee, Maggie

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.

—Malamud, Bernard

The politics of our society are a conversation in which past, present and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion properly prevail none permanently dominates, and on this account we are free.

—Oakeshott, Michael Joseph

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.

—Sandburg, Carl

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

—Hartley, L(eslie) P(oles)

   The Past is a strange land, most strange.

—Thomas, (Philip) Edward

But the past is just the same,öand War's a bloody game.

—Sassoon, Siegfried Louvain

Ich bin Schriftsteller von Beruf. Ich versuche, gegen die vergehende Zeit anzuschreiben, damit dasVergangene nicht unbekannt bleibt. I am a writer by profession. I seek in my writing to hold back time so that the past is not forgotten.

—Grass, Gu«  nter Wilhelm

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet, The only sweet thing that is not also fleet.

—Thomas, (Philip) Edward

Of historyand its consequences it may be said: 'Those who can, gloat; those who can't, brood.' Englishmen are born gloaters; Irishmen born brooders. There are, it is true, brooders who take to gloating, and they did much to build the Empire.Yet the brooder-gloater, such as the Irishman turned Englishman, is not, as a human type, altogether a success. He is a little too much on his guard, like an excessivelyassimilated Jew, or a son of Harlem who has decided to'pass'. The past of the Irishman, the Jew, the Negro, is, psychologically, too explosive to be buried.

—Cruise

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.

—Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia ne¤  e Stephen

Le colonialisme ne se satisfait pas d'enserrer le peuple dans ses mailles, de vider le cerveau colonise¤   de toute forme et de tout contenu. Par une sorte de perversion de la logique, il s'oriente vers le passe¤   du peuple opprime¤  , le distort, le de¤  figure, l'ane¤  antit. Colonialismisnot satisfiedmerely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. Bya kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.

—Fanon, Frantz Omar

The past was nothing to her† The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant.

—Chopin, Kate (Katherine) ne¤  e  O'Flaherty

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.

—Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair

No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last 25 years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it, but all that fades away before the spectacle that is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies, flashes away.I seethe Russian soldiersstanding on thethreshold of their native land, guarding the fields that their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe.

—Churchill, Lord Randolph Henry Spencer

All that I know of our historyand thehistoryof the Indian Ocean I have got from books written by Europeans† Without Europeans, I feel, all our past would have been washed away, like the scuff marks of fishermen on the beach.

—Naipaul, Sir V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad)

Our greatest responsibility is not to be pencils of the past.

—Sterling, Rod

The present is the funeral of the past, And man the living sepulchre of life.

—Clare,John

He who desires and acts not, breeds pestilence.

—Blake,William

Psychology has a long past, but onlya short history.

—Ebbinghaus, Hermann

   To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

—McCarthy,Joseph R(aymond)

The best way to suppose what may come, is to remember what is past.

—Halifax, George Savile, 1st Marquis of

And the motive for recording these scraps of the past? It Greenspan is much the same motive that has made me a novelist: a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order, and a hungry curiosity.

—Greene, (Henry) Graham

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

—Beerbohm, Sir (Henry) Max(imilian)

It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven out far past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

—Hemingway, Ernest Millar

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—Sandys, George

Let it not be said of this Atlantic generation that we left ideals and visions to the past, nor purpose and determination to our adversaries.We have come too far, we have sacrificed too much to disdain the future now.

—Kennedy,John F(itzgerald)

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!

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe

The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

—Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert)

When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more, And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before, What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye? What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie?

—Whittier,John Greenleaf

   'Who controls the past,'ran the Party slogan,'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'

—Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair