Famous Quotes & Sayings

Samuel Butler

Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity.

Samuel Beckett

What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can. But mostly I shall use the various tenses of the past. For mostly I do not know, it is perhaps no longer so, it is too soon to know, I simply do not know, perhaps shall never know.

Ryan Phillippe

Over the past 10 years of being famous, my relationship with the camera has not been a pleasant one.

Waris Ahluwalia

I'm driven by history and our past. That's why I work in gold. It's in your veins. We've been lusting after gold since the beginning of time. God, glory, and gold.

W. P. Kinsella

It is hard to compare the eras, but Joe Jackson and Ty Cobb from the past, Sandy Koufax and Roger Clements from the present.

W. G. Sebald

Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

W. G. Sebald

The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.

W. S. Merwin

The attempt to live that way, the attempt to treat everybody - it fails all the time - but the attempt to treat people as equals is a good attempt. It's a very good attempt. And there have been very few governments that have come anywhere near it in the past. The Greeks began to, the Romans began to - they both failed.

Virginia Gildersleeve

The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community - these are the most vital things that education must try to produce.

W. H. Auden

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.

W. H. Auden

It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.

W. H. Auden

Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.

William Cowper

How readily we wish time spent revoked, that we might try the ground again where once--through inexperience, as we now perceive--we missed that happiness we might have found!

Wayne Hale

The Columbia accident made us realize that we had been playing Russian roulette with the shuttle crews -- that we had been very, very fortunate in the past that the foam did not cause critical damage.

Wayne Dyer

Even if you are loaded down with guilt about everything you did in the past, you still are experiencing the guilt in the moment.

Wayne Dyer

To be born again is to let the past go, and look without condemnation upon the present.

Townes Van Zandt

Human's can't live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human's are always thinking about the future or the past.

Van Jones

If you look at my career over the past twenty years, I've always been trying to look around corners for low-income communities of color.

Tyra Banks

I'm competitive with myself. I always try to push past my own borders.

Tyga

I turned down a lot of reality shows in the past, but MTV, back in the day, was just the coolest with Cribs to Pimp My Ride.

Vladimir Putin

At no time in the past, now or in the future has or will Russia take any part in actions aimed at overthrowing the legitimate government. I'm talking about something else right now - when someone does this, the outcome is very negative. Libya's state is disintegrated, Iraq's territory is flooded with terrorists, it looks like the scenario will be the same for Syria, and you know what the situation is in Afghanistan.

William Glasser

What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now.

William Graham Sumner

But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the past.

William H. Gass

it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

William Golding

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

Wilhelm Keitel

I am a soldier and I worked for the kaiser, under Ebert, Hindenburg, and Hitler, all the same way, for the past 44 years.

Warren Zevon

Duncan Aldrich has been my partner in most recording projects, and touring projects, for the past decade.

Stephenie Meyer

It was all very childish. Why on earth should Edward have to leave for Jacob to come over? Weren't we past this immaturity?

Maybe Italians are a bit less restrained: they can be less rigid and sometimes they stray a little in their ways of dressing for work, which is something that is always linked to the formal suit. What we like of both Italians and the British is that they love to dress well. In the past ten years we have witnessed a revolution in the menswear market.

Steffi Graf

I never hanker after the past - I prefer to devote myself to new tasks.

Thomas Pynchon

Right and left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets manipulated by mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.

Thomas Hardy

Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.