I try to incorporate faith every day, to not remind myself of past failures, to learn how to forgive and to trust the future.
The individual who has been liberated by reason is always running head-on into a world, a society, whose past in the shape of 'prejudices' has a great deal of power; he is forced to learn that past reality is also a reality.
In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively
You know, I think I had my first past life recall when I was 7.
Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.
I think [Donald Trump] does understand that. We talked a great deal about the separation on power and the constitution. And we`re very excited about what he`s doing because what he`s doing is pulling back what we see as unconstitutional executive actions from the past presidents.
Where I am today is my starting point. Who I am today is my starting point. My failures and successes of the past, my fears and hopes of the future are all shadows. Today is my reality, and I'll use it to create my world.
People accept a representation in which the elements of wish and fantasy are purposely included but which nevertheless proclaims to represent "the past" and to serve as a guide-rule for life, thereby hopelessly confusing the spheres of knowledge and will.
Because who can describe that look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?
When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our “fault. ” But it is undeniably our inheritance.
Until we have finally accepted the fact that there is nothing we can do to change the past, our feelings of regret and remorse and bitterness will prevent us from designing a better future with the opportunity that is before us today.
I don't know if music has ever achieved anything past appealing to the people that it appeals to. If a song could stop a war, then Bob Marley and Bob Dylan songs would have stopped one or two.
Each generation, we peel back biases that have blinded those before us. The more we know about the past enables us to ask richer and more provocative questions about who we are today.
They take the greats from the past and compare us. I wonder if they'd ever survive in this era. In a time where it's recreation, to pull all your skeletons out the closet like Halloween decorations.
This thing you carry inside you, I don't know what it is. I don't know where you got it. But Harry, the past is the past. You are alive today. That is all that matters. You must remember, because it is who you are, but as it is who you are, you must never, ever regret. To regret your past is to regret your soul.
Here lies interred in the eternity of the past, from whence there is no resurrection for the days - whatever there may be for the dust - the thirty-third year of an ill-spent life, which, after a lingering disease of many months sank into a lethargy, and expired, January 22d, 1821, A. D. leaving a successor inconsolable for the very loss which occasioned its existence.
History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.
I never hanker after the past - I prefer to devote myself to new tasks.
In December people give no thought to the Past or the Future. They thing only of the Present.
In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.