Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.
There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of the comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.
There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.
When we think we have been hurt by someone in the past, we build up defenses to protect ourselves from being hurt in the future. So the fearful past causes a fearful future and the past and future become one.
God wastes nothing - not even sin. The soul that has struggled and come through is enriched by it's experiences, and Grace does not merely blot out the evil past but in the most literal sense "makes it good."
If only I could visit you as a foreigner goes into a new country, learn the language of you, wander past all borders into every private and secret place, I would stay forever. I would become a citizen of you.
The future will be no primrose path. It will have its own problems. Some will be the secular problems of the past, giant flowers of evil blossoming at last to their own destruction. Others will be wholly new.
I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.
I don't talk about my past; people ask me about it. I've done things I'm ashamed of, but one thing I can honestly say is that things I've done that I regret, I've never done twice. I work really hard at that.
We Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we're barely past childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.
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.
Children have neither past nor future; and that which seldom happens to us, they rejoice in the present. [Fr., Les enfants n'ont ni passe ni avenir; et, ce qui ne nous arrive guere, ils jouissent du present.]
Imagine all the food mankind has produced over the past 8,000 years. Now consider that we need to produce that same amount again — but in just the next 40 years if we are to feed our growing and hungry world.
It's funny, we all really, really got along. I don't know how it was in years past but this year, I was really with a good group of people. No one tried to sabotage each other or steal the other ones moments.
The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and dote on past achievement.
Only when all conceptions of space and time, life and death, are exploded, when the grip of the past and fear of the future become merely conditions of one's past, only then can one live in the present fully.
The fact is that we as a party at the Republican National Committee registered 3.4 million new voters in the past two years and brought them into the political process. The president won by 3.5 million votes.
Everything we have today that's cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past. Action figures, videogames, superhero movies, iPods: All are continuations of a love that wanted more.
Looking back into childhood is like looking into a semi-transparent globe within which people and places lie embedded. A shake - and they stir, rise up, circle in inter-weaving groups, then settle down again.
Ansel [Adams] always jumped over the fence to photograph, walked past the garbage. He always looked to get an immaculate view, and I spent my life stepping back to include the garbage in my photographic view.
The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.
Most of society thinks that biography is destiny, that the past equals the future, and of course it does if you live there...but what we really have to remind ourselves is that decision is the ultimate power.
The difference between past and present immigration experience is the existence of a defiant anti-assimilationist lobby that encourages legal and illegal aliens to resist adapting to the American way of life.
As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.
Those who have studied the Bible Code know that everything that has ever happened in the past, in the future or in the present is already written down, and they never found an error until 1998, when they did.
In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.
I really enjoy the pastiche storytelling of watching separate stories slowly collide with one another. The audience gets to participate in trying to guess and decipher how one story will connect with another.
When I come to the rink each day, in my heart and my mind, I'm going to expect to win, because that's the way I think. It's going to be way different than it has in the past for me, in some ways, coming here.
Salvation is one of the Bible's great words, but many don't understand that the Bible presents salvation in three stages. Many people consider salvation a one-time, past event. They forget its ongoing nature.
I want women to really look like women from today. It's not from the past and not from the future, because I don't know what happens in the future. It is the woman of today (who) I think is a seductive woman.
It was never too late to learn something. The past is unalterable in any event. The future is the only thing we can change. Learning the lessons of the past is the only way to shape the present and the future.
Life is like a game of chess...there are many moves possible, but each move determines your next move...where you wind up is the sum total of all your past moves...but first you have to make some kind of move.
We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.
If you cannot free people from their wrongs and see them as the needy people they are, you enslave yourself to your own painful past and by fastening yourself to the past, you let your hate become your future.
Through forgiveness, which essentially means recognizing the insubstantiality of the past and allowing the present moment to be as it is, the miracle of transformation happens not only within but also without.
The past has no power over us. It doesn't matter how long we have had a negative pattern. The point of power is in the present moment. What a wonderful thing to realize! We can begin to be free in this moment!
Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is.
There is no circumstance, no trouble, no testing, that can ever touch me until, first of all, it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me. If it has come that far, it has come with great purpose.
If you feel comfortable by shaving your body, then shave your body. I feel comfortable keeping my body ready by shaving. I don't think it's unmanly to shave; I think that if you can get past that, you're fine.
Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the - to the back!
When you get into the series, the progression is much different. You actually have breathing room and the chance to sit down with each actor, which was a part of our process, to talk to them about their pasts.
All freedom to man, but freedom is useful when we know what life is, when we know what past is, what present is, when we know how to go about things, not that every man should be left to experiment by himself.
Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.
Conventional wisdom is invariably out of date. Because in the time it has taken to become conventional - to become what everyone believes - the world has moved on. Conventional wisdom is a remnant of the past.
The Secret Service said there have been 40 fence-jumping incidents at the White House in the past five years. Half of them were intruders trying to get in. The other half was President Obama trying to get out.
There has been a noticeable decline in the labor factor in all wealthy countries in the past 20 years. The rich are getting richer, but those at the lower end aren't moving ahead as quickly as the capitalists.
When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.
A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.
In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others.
Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.