Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ethel Barrymore

Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping.

Ethan Hawke

My goal is to tell good stories. And to try as best I can to do something new with acting. To learn from the past and to be a relevant artist. To make stories that are interesting and contemporary and to tell some kind of emotional truth.

Errol Morris

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

Errol Morris

Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it.

Ernest Rutherford

I congratulate you both on a fine piece of work which I am sure will ultimately prove of importance. I am personally very much interested in your results... In the past I have tried a number of experiments... but without any success.

Ernest Renan

To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together; to wish to do greater; these are the essential conditions which make up a people

Ernest Dimnet

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

Erich von Stroheim

If I speak of Vienna it must be in the past tense, as a man speaks of a woman he has loved and who is dead.

Erin Morgenstern

The past stays on you the way powdered sugar stays on your fingers. Some people can get rid of it but it’s still there, the events and things that pushed you to where you are now.

Cassandra Clare

He'd felt like a jack-o-lantern for the past few days, as if his guts had been yanked out with a fork and dumped in a heap while a grinning smile stayed plastered on his face.

Cassandra Clare

I would die for you. You know that. I would die without you. If it were not for you, I would be dead a hundred times over these past five years.

Cassandra Clare

Maia pulled on a braid. "I ran into Eric of all people. He told me what happened and that you'd backed out of Millenium Lint's gigs for the past two weeks because of it." "Actually, they changed their name," Jordan said. "They're Midnight Burrito now.

Cassandra Clare

You can't forget the things you did in the past, or you'll never learn from them.

Caroline Norton

Oh, there at last, life's trials past, / We'll meet our loved ones more, / Whose feet have trod the path to God, -- / Not lost, but gone before.

Carolyn Mackler

But it there's anything I've learned in the past few months, it's that the only thing that's certain in life is that nothing in life is certain.

Carmen Kass

I don't think Estonians ever really hated Russians. It was more, 'Leave us alone.' We can't change what is past. We can't blame them for what their parents have done. We never hated them. They didn't destroy us that bad.

Jeremy Siegel

It can be shown that maximum diversification is achieved by holding each stock in proportion to its value to the entire market (italics added)... Hindsight plays tricks on our minds... often distorts the past and encourages us to play hunches and outguess other investors, who in turn are playing the same game. For most of us, trying to beat the market leads to disastrous results... our actions lead to much lower returns than can be achieved by just staying in the market.

Jeremy Rifkin

The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grains represents an...evil whose consequences may be far greater and longer lasting than any past examples of violence inflicted by men against thier fellow human beings.

Jenna Blum

We are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past?

Gilbert K. Chesterton

We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

Frank Herbert

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and predator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself — a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.

Frank Herbert

Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity.

Frank Herbert

The past is no farther away than your pillow.

Frank Herbert

Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.

George H. W. Bush

If we have learned anything in the past quarter century, it is that we cannot Federalize Virtue.

George Harrison

It's wonderful to look back and think you were part of a force that shaped modern music and influenced the public in so many ways. However, that's all in the past.

Harold Bloom

We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

Haile Selassie

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

Haile Selassie

We must act to shape and mold the future, and leave our imprint on events as they slip past into history.

Gunther Schuller

So this anchoring in some way, in some important way in the past without repeating the past, but on the basis of the past building something new: that is what is important.

Greg Mortenson

. . . hope resides in the future, while perspective and wisdom are almost always found by looking to the past.

Greg Norman

I would say that it's quadruple what I've had when I've won major championships in the past. I've gotten faxes and phone calls from all over the world. It's been overwhelming. It's really changed my opinion of humanity.