Past Quotations

I've always tried to go a step past wherever people expected me to end up.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The past always looks better than it was. It's only pleasant because it isn't here.

The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.

I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.

It's easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present and their past, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often then not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.

Sometimes opportunities float right past your nose. Work hard, apply yourself, and be ready. When an opportunity comes you can grab it.

If you are carrying strong feelings about something that happened in your past, they may hinder your ability to live in the present.

Stop watering things that were never meant to grow in your life. Water what works, what's good, what's right. Stop playing around with those dead bones and stuff you can't fix, its over...leave it alone! You're coming into a season of greatness. If you water what's alive and divine, you will see harvest like you've never seen before. Stop wasting water on dead issues, dead relationships, dead people, a dead past. No matter how much you water concrete, you can't grow a garden.

I wouldn't exactly call it 'cooking' but I can make noodles. That means I can boil water, put the pasta in and wait until it's done.

I think family is very important in West Virginia and has long been so because the mountains made travel difficult in the past, and family members had to depend on each other.

Use the losses and failures of the past as a reason for action, not inaction.

The past is a stronger influence in the South. But I think everywhere you have this sense that the world changes faster than you can accommodate yourself to. Looking back and seeing how you got where you are is a useful way to combat disorientation.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.

I believe that I was a dog in a past life. That's the only thing that would explain why I like to snack on Purina Dog Chow.

It's just different discipline, just doing the voice over. I guess I've done about 5 or 6 audio books in the past and I do the animated voice for a show called Fatherhood on Nickelodeon.

I don't believe in regrets. There are a few things I'd do differently, but I can't go back in time and redo them, however much I might wish to. All I can do is learn from past mistakes and move forward.

One of the most persistent misconceptions about blindness is that it is a curse from God for misdeeds perpetrated in a past life, which cloaks the blind person in spiritual darkness and makes him not just dangerous, but evil.

In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first... The first object of any good system must be that of developing first class men.

Attachment and aversion are the root cause of karma, and karma originates from infatuation. Karma is the root cause of birth and death, and these are said to be the source of misery. None can escape the effect of their own past karma.

There's one thing very important to me in business and for the long-term: always be honest with people. For the past 60 years, I always pay my debts.

Don't waste time on what's not important. Don't get sucked into the drama. Get on with it: don't dwell on the past. Be a big person; be generous of spirit; be the person you'd admire.

The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.

Emmitt Smith has run past legends, danced with stars and posed for the sculptor crafting his Hall of Fame bust. Hes built upon his athletic talents by working hard, seizing opportunities and reaching out to others for advice when he needed it.

Assuredly, Loving Souls, you should go to God with all humility and respect, humbling yourselves in His presence, especially when you remember your past ingratitude and sins.

Two children of same cruel parent look at one another and see in each other the image of the cruel parent or the image of their past oppressor. This is very much the case between Jew and Arab: It's a conflict between two victims.

Death is the last enemy: once we've got past that I think everything will be alright.

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.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be

There cannot be any better cross-section of America and I think the soldiers represent the best we have. Today's soldiers are brighter and smarter, perhaps in a different way, than past generations because they've been brought up in the computer and information age.

Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.

Successful people maintain a positive focus in life no matter what is going on around them. They stay focused on their past successes rather than their past failures, and on the next action steps they need to take to get them closer to the fulfillment of their goals rather than all the other distractions that life presents to them.

In 1973, America imported 30 percent of its crude oil needs. Today, that number has doubled to more than 60 percent. Gas prices are as high as they are now in part because we've had no comprehensive national energy policy for the past few decades

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

I leave CNN with the utmost respect, love and admiration for the company and everyone who works here. This has been my family and shared endeavor for the past 27 years, and I am forever grateful and proud of all that we have accomplished.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.

One of the best ways to make yourself happy in the present is to recall happy times from the past. Photos are a great memory-prompt, and because we tend to take photos of happy occasions, they weight our memories to the good.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember

The lessons of the past should steer us towards ensuring lasting legacies for generations yet to be born.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution, and it was designed to eat the Constitution, to progress past the Constitution.

Parents are like shuttles on a loom. They join the threads of the past with threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go.

France cannot be destroyed. She is an old country who, despite her misfortunes, has, and always will have, thanks to her past, a tremendous prestige in the world, whatever the fate inflicted upon her.

I recall feeling an almost delicious terror when one day I found myself alone in the midst of tall June grasses that grew high as my head. But here the secret working of self consciousness is almost too entangled with the things of the past for me to explain it.

Praises for our past triumphs are as feathers to a dead bird.

We need fundamental change. In the past, national development led to people's happiness but now the link between national growth and improvement in people's lives has been severed.

The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.

Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.

The 1984 European Championships were held in France and that was something important. I felt on form then, even though I was practically always injured at all the World Cups. It's a great memory. But in any case, the past is past.

But this Veterans Day, I believe we should do more than sing the praises of the bravery and patriotism that our veterans have embodied in the past. We should take this opportunity to re-evaluate how we are treating our veterans in the present.

We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits.

There's nothing particularly dark in my past... I live in the light. My disposition is basically happy. I have a good life.

In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space... But you laid the foundation for space tourism.

Asean is obviously a very important association for us. Over the past 30 years Asean has made great strides in regional cooperation covering a number of areas, although recently it has been under strain because of the financial crisis and other challenges.

Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.

We must not try to force him to take civilization immediately in its complete form, but under just laws, guaranteeing to Indians equal civil laws, the Indian question, a source of such dishonor to our country and of shame to true patriots, will soon be a thing of the past.

I love being able to escape my past, even though my past was great.

There is no teacher, living or past, who can give us the actual understanding of truth. A teacher can only put our feet upon the path and point the way. That is all. It is wholly dependent on the individual to make his way to truth.

What's crucial is that the IRA produce a credible statement that paramilitary and criminality activity is a thing of the past. That they are committed to a future which is exclusively peaceful and democratic.

Architecture should be rooted in the past, and yet be part of our own time and forward looking.

Past records of inter-Korean relations show that confrontation between fellow countrymen leads to nothing but war.

I like science fiction, I like fantasy, I like time travel, so I had this idea: What if you had a phone that could call into the past?

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

I don't care too much what happened in the past. I prefer to focus on what is coming next and I am really looking forward to it.

The global phenomenon of poverty tourism - or 'poorism' - has become increasingly popular during the past few years. Tourists pay to be guided through the favelas of Brazil and the shantytowns of South Africa. The recently opened Los Angeles Gang Tour carries visitors through battle-scarred territories of urban violence and deprivation.

During my past career as a journalist, I relished writing obits and equally dreaded phoning relatives for the necessary facts. But to my surprise and great relief, they often wanted to talk - they wanted their recently deceased loved ones recorded in print.

The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as the generation gap.

People who live in the past generally are afraid to compete in the present. I've got my faults, but living in the past is not one of them. There's no future in it.

One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image.

See, what you're meant to do when you have a mid-life crisis is buy a fast car, aren't you? Well, I've always had fast cars. It's not that. It's the fear that you're past your best. It's the fear that the stuff you've done in the past is your best work.

First and foremost I am a chef, whether behind the stove at one of my Northern California restaurants or for the past 15 years in front of the camera on my Food Network cooking shows. Creating new dishes and flavor combinations that bring cooks and our restaurant guests pleasure is my job and I love it.

We are the country that has attracted the biggest volume of foreign investment in southeastern Europe in the past few years. Romania doesn't need to beat itself, believing that it is a second-class citizen.

A poor choice of words conveyed to some the impression that I embrace the discarded policies of the past. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I apologize to anyone who was offended by my statement.

What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.

Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form - not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.

Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.

In the long march of history, at least two poles of attraction and antagonism have been the norm in world politics. Rarely has only one nation carried the burden of leadership. The unipolar world of the 21st century, dominated for the past two decades by the United States, is a historical anomaly.

These past years, as we have been recovering and given our city a rebirth, we have been encouraged by our faith, knowledge, and steadfast belief that we will pull through. There will be challenges and setbacks, as there have already been, but we will continue, and we the citizens of New Orleans will prevail in bringing our city back.

I think all in all, one thing a lot of plays seem to be saying is that we need to, as black Americans, to make a connection with our past in order to determine the kind of future we're going to have. In other words, we simply need to know who we are in relation to our historical presence in America.

I feel like I'm part of a generation of people who are stuck in the past and are really self-absorbed. I mean, we're actually taking pictures of ourselves and posting them on Facebook, and keeping in touch with people that should have been out of our lives 15 years ago.

Country music is always changing but the Opry is always there to serve as a lighthouse for what country music really is. The past, present and future is all encompassed by not only the physical structure of the building but also the radio show.

There are such beings as vampires, some of us have evidence that they exist. Even had we not the proof of our own unhappy experience, the teachings and the records of the past give proof enough for sane peoples.

John Wells let me write a couple of West Wings, which was an incredible gift. I loved it once I got past the brain injury part of it, and so I'm working on a couple of things that are far from fruition, but what I want to pursue

A woman past forty should make up her mind to be young; not her face.

I wanted to make connections between Whale's past and present.

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

I have issues with anyone who tries to claim that science is unworkable - creationists who deny evidence for past history, yet are happy to benefit from the products of the methodology that they otherwise deny.

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

It is a sad commentary that today we face a choice between having schools that are a monument to our past - or schools that will be the lifeblood of our future. But since that is our choice, let us resolve to choose wisely.

The study of history empowers nations and individuals with an ability to avoid errors of the past and lay foundations for victories in the future.

In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer - the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with the power.

So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, theres never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.

Universities used to prepare young adults for the real world. I dare say the graduates today go in without a clue and graduate without a clue. It's time to acknowledge the college degree is not worth what it was in the past. Times are changing, and so is the way we prepare our youth to survive in a competitive world.