Famous Quotes & Sayings

Alexander Pope

Old politicians chew on wisdom past, And totter on in business to the last.

Alexander Pope

Some positive persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so; But you with pleasure own your errors past, And make each day a critique on the last.

Alex Trebek

My life is what it is, and I can't change it. I can change the future, but I can't do anything about the past.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz

We will certainly be focused on making sure that the prosperity we have been able to accomplish in the past 8 years under the leadership of Mr. [Barack] Obama, continues.

Debbie Ford

If we want a new future that does not look like our past, we must make new choices in the present.

Debbie Ford

As you continue the work of acknowledging and claiming the gifts of your past and standing in the power of your present, you are freeing up enormous reserves of creative energy.

Debbie Ford

To get past your ego and its defenses you need to get quiet, be brave, and listen to your inner voices....When you embrace the messages of each aspect of your shadow, you begin to take back the power you’ve given to others and form a bond of trust with your authentic self. The voices of your unembraced qualities, when allowed into your consciousness, will bring you back into balance and harmony with your natural rhythms.

E. P. Thompson

We must not look at the past with the enormous condescension of posterity.

E. O. Wilson

Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind.

E. M. Forster

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

Drew Gilpin Faust

Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.

Douglas Rushkoff

On Facebook, your past comes into your present when someone from your second grade class suddenly pops up to send you a message, and your future is being manipulated by what Facebook knows to put in front of you next.

Don DeLillo

People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.

Don DeLillo

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

Don DeLillo

There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

Don DeLillo

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax

The past is the best way to suppose what may come.

Dylan Thomas

The function of posterity is to look after itself.

Douglas Alexander

It's important to learn the right lessons from the past.

Doug Stanhope

The fact is that really no comedian sets out to offend you. Some comics enjoy the challenge of taking a subject that is likely to be found offensive and trying to make it funny‚ but the object is still to make you laugh. Offense is only a calculated risk. It's highly unlikely that a comedian whose only goal was to repulse you would ever make it past an open-mic stage, far less build a long career of touring theatres and television appearances.

Doug Stanhope

I don't like being in the UK for every other reason aside from the show. It's aesthetically uncomfortable to me on almost every level for reasons that might sound petty but I can't get past. The audiences are far more challenging and while I wouldn't say I prefer it, I certainly need it to ward off my inherent laziness.

Douglas Adams

When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane and you lazily sail past a few hard-driving cars and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself and then accidently change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your hood in a rather ugly mess, it tends to throw you off stride in much the same way that this remark threw Ford Prefect off his.

Douglas Adams

Time affords us the ability to blame past errors on others while whole heartedly pronouncing our futures successes.

Douglas Adams

How do I know the past is not a fiction conceived to reconcile the difference between my state of mind and the present.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

Dale Carnegie

You and I are standing this very second at the meeting place of two eternities: the vast past that has endured forever, and the future that is plunging on to the last syllable of recorded time. We can't possible live in either of those eternities - no, not even for a split second. But, by trying to do so, we can wreck both our bodies and our minds. So let's be content to live the only time we can possible live: from now until bedtime.

Crispin Glover

In the past, I've never tried to discount or stop what people are saying because on some levels I find it interesting.

Craig Shirley

If we are to put the past on trial, where do we stop?

Craig McCaw

The past is past and I guess if you live in the past, you cease to live.

Claude Debussy

When asked by a grumpily puzzled professor what "rules" he followed, Debussy is said to have retorted, mon plaisir "whatever I please" and he further claimed that more was to be gained by watching the sun rise than by listening to the Pastoral Symphony. Although such remarks were intended to shock, they contain a core of Debussyan verity...

Claude Levi-Strauss

Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize... the immense riches accumulated by the human race. By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

Claude Levi-Strauss

While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

Daniel Radcliffe

I think pressure is a good thing and it's good to be able to feel it and use it and experience the feeling of it and especially if you can get past it.