Famous Quotes & Sayings

James Cameron

Your only competitors are your past achievements.

James A. Garfield

We hold reunions, not for the dead, for there is nothing in all the earth that you and I can do for the dead. They are past our help and past our praise. We can add to them no glory, we can give to them no immortality. They do not need us, but forever and forever more we need them.

James A. Baldwin

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

James A. Baldwin

To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

The idea of a group of elders is that, in past civilizations, they have linked worlds; the other world was also present in this one. There is also the argument that elders have "experience." The problem is that experience teaches fear of change. Experience kills imagination. Experience makes people conservative. What we are facing tomorrow requires the force of imagination, not wisdom from yesterday.

Jackie Stewart

It takes leadership to improve safety. And I started off the movement in my time, but the person who has done more over the past 20 to 30 years and who has led it is Professor Sid Watkins.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee

For me it's the challenge -- the challenge to try to beat myself or do better than I did in the past. I try to keep in mind not what I have accomplished but what I have to try to accomplish in the future.

Jackie Kennedy

Americans care about their past, but for short term gain they ignore it and tear down everything that matters.

Christopher Lasch

A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.

Christopher Lasch

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.

Christopher Isherwood

But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until — later of sooner — perhaps — no, not perhaps — quite certainly: it will come.

Christopher Isherwood

The past is just something that's over.

George Harrison

It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. All there is ever, is the now.

George Harrison

If a car comes past me in a traffic jam with a boom box going, I jump out of my skin. Those big booming basses. I'm just more sensitive to noise these days.

George Harrison

The Past is gone and the future might not even be, the only thing we ever experience is the now, I try to enjoy the minute.

George Harrison

They used us as an excuse to go mad and then blamed it on us. Gandhi says create and preserve the image of your choice. The image of my choice is not Beatle George - those who want that can go and see Wings. Why live in the past? Be here now.

Gaston Bachelard

The poetic image […] is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of any image, the distant past resounds with echoes.

Gaston Bachelard

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.

Gaston Bachelard

The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest in the universe imagined by reverie.

Gary Zukav

Your experiences are not limited to what you have created in the past

Gary Burton

I've discovered all kinds of music and done all kinds of music over the past 40 years, from playing tango with Piazzolla to all the different bands I've had.

Gary Becker

The Treatise tries to analyze not only modern Western families, but also those in other cultures and the changes in family structure during the past several centuries.

Gary Busey

F-A-I-L-I-N-G [is] Finding An Important Lesson, Inviting Needed Growth. So you don't actually fail, you find a better way to do whatever you're doing, and that's your ability, the truth of your core from past life experiences to where you are now in this life. It gives you the ability to be in your truth, without anything holding you down in a box that will never open.

Fulton J. Sheen

The world may disagree with the Church, but the world knows very definitely with what it is disagreeing. In the future as in the past, the Church will be intolerant about the sanctity of marriage, for what God has joined together no man shall put asunder; she will be intolerant about her creed, and be ready to die for it, for she fears not those who kill the body, but rather those who have the power to cast body and soul into hell.

Frank Ocean

A friend of mine jokes that I have a painstaking royalty complex. Like maybe I was a duke in a past life.

Frank O'Hara

And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines with nudes and the posters for bullfight and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they'll soon tear down.

Frank O'Hara

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.

George Catlin

I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization.

Christina Aguilera

I really feel free and not as serious as I have been in the past.

Christian Marclay

It was part of a financial situation. I could only afford records in thrift stores. Then you could find wonderful things, but now everything is a collectible. I like the recycling idea --using the stuff that people don't want anymore, and make new music out of it. There was an element of looking back and listening to your parents' records and doing something with that stuff. Sort of acknowledging the past while rejecting it at the same time.

Christian Lacroix

I am not nostalgic for the past.

Chris Rock

I took my AlDS test. You start reflecting... You start thinking about every nasty, skank-ass... It's like the movie Scrooge, and the Ghost of Pussy Past comes.

Chris Noth

I always get involved with the environment because once you go past the tipping point with the environment, you don't get it back.