Famous Quotes & Sayings

Pablo Casals

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner... I go to the piano, and I play preludes and fugues of Bach... It is a sort of benediction on the house.

Pablo Casals

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine, but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.

Pablo Neruda

I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.

Pablo Neruda

We have to discard the past / and, as one builds / floor by floor, window by window, / and the building rises, / so do we keep shedding - first, broken tiles, / then proud doors... and each new day / gleams / like an empty / plate.

Plato

No one punishes the evil-doer under the notion, or for the reason, that he has done wrong -- only the unreasonable fury of a beast acts in that way. But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong, for that which is done cannot be undone, but he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again.

Philip Zimbardo

What happens when good people are put into an evil place? Do they triumph or does the situation dominate their past history and morality?

Philip Larkin

Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word--the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.

Philip Larkin

One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.

Paul Zane Pilzer

In just the past century we have almost doubled the percentage of fat in our diets--from 20% in 1910 to about 35% today.

Paula Fox

There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.

Paula Deen

There's not one food that causes diabetes.What causes Type II diabetes is being overweight... I've just come to grips, over the past four or five months, with my diabetes.

Paul Weller

In the past we used to come over to see what was going on in London or Paris or Milan or wherever - it's pretty much the same stuff everywhere [now], and people are wearing the same things, because it's all instantaneous with the Internet.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead

But as an actor you do want to challenge yourself and step outside what you have done in the past and that what I like to do, I like to jump around and try different things and stretch myself.

Martin Schulz

We're at a historical juncture: A growing number of people are declaring what has been achieved over the past decades in Europe to be wrong. They want to return to the nation-state. Sometimes there is even a blood and soil rhetoric that for me is starkly reminiscent of the interwar years of the past century, whose demons we are still all too familiar with.

Martin Seligman

The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future.

Martin Seligman

We're not prisoners of the past.

Martin Scorsese

The more you see, especially being young, the more you see the past, the more you can draw upon that and the more you can make the present and the future. It's how you process the past and at oftentimes in the picture, there are references to certain imagery from certain pictures, and certain novels.

Martin Scorsese

Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It's a cacophony, it's like a madness I think that's been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.

Philip Sidney

Fearfulness, contrary to all other vices, maketh a man think the better of another, the worse of himself.

Philip Guston

Many works of the past complete what they announce they are going to do, to our increasing boredom. Certain others plague me because I cannot follow their intentions. I can tell at a glance what Fabritius is doing, but I am spending my life trying to find out what Rembrandt was up to.

Philip Guston

The things I felt... about certain painters of the past that... inspired me, like Cezanne and Manet... that complete losing of oneself in the work to such an extent that the work itself... felt as if a living organism was posited there on the canvas, on this surface... That's truly... the act of creation.

Peyton Manning

When you go through a significant injury and have a major career change, you truly do go one year at a time, and you don't look past what's going on now, because you are not sure what's going to happen. Tomorrow is not promised.

Peter De Vries

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Peter Drucker

Capital formation is shifting from the entrepreneur who invests in the future to the pension trustee who invests in the past.

Peter Drucker

Look at government programs for the past fifty years. Every single one - except warfare - achieved the exact opposite of its announced goal.

Peter Drucker

The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.

Peter Benchley

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.

Penelope Lively

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

Penelope Lively

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

Penelope Lively

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

Penelope Lively

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

Peggy Noonan

No news conferences? Interviews now only with friendly journalists? You can't be president or vice president and govern in that style, as a sequestered figure. This has been Mr. Bush's style the past few years, and see where it got us. You must address America in its entirety, not as a sliver or a series of slivers but as a full and whole entity, a great nation trying to hold together. When you don't, when you play only to your little piece, you contribute to its fracturing.

Paulo Coelho

We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better.... or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do.... But at this precise moment, you also realize that you can change your future by bringing the past into the present. Past and future only exist in our mind. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.... It isn't what you did in the past the will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.