Famous Quotes & Sayings

Samuel Johnson

For sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.

Samuel Johnson

The present time is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.

Samuel Johnson

Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions

Samuel Johnson

Those who have past much of their lives in this great city, look upon its opulence and its multitudes, its extent and variety, with cold indifference; but an inhabitant of the remoter parts of the kingdom is immediately distinguished by a kind of dissipated curiosity, a busy endeavour to divide his attention amongst a thousand objects, and a wild confusion of astonishment and alarm.

Samuel Johnson

Sir, sorrow is inherent in humanity. As you cannot judge two and two to be either five, or three, but certainly four, so, when comparing a worse present state with a better which is past, you cannot but feel sorrow. It is not cured by reason, but by the incursion of present objects, which bear out the past.

Rumer Willis

I feel like I have an inner drag queen. Or rather, I feel like I was a drag queen in a past life.

Roxane Gay

The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this truth.

Roxane Gay

When you look past the image, a celebrity is merely a person you know nothing about.

Rowan Williams

The past is what the present is doing now.

Ronald Reagan

Don't let the doom criers and the cynics persuade you that the best is past.

Robert Hughes

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.

Roddy Woomble

I'm quite happy for my voice to be pushed up, whereas in the past I wanted it buried with the guitars, or part of the band, not like I was thinking of myself as 'the singer'.

Robyn

I wondered what things what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.

Roberto Bolano

Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.

Roberto Bolano

Nothing is ever behind us.

Roberto Bolano

Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.

Robertson Davies

In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries.

Robertson Davies

The best among our writers are doing their accustomed work of mirroring what is deep in the spirit of our time; if chaos appears in those mirrors, we must have faith that in the future, as always in the past, that chaos will slowly reveal itself as a new aspect of order.

Robert Palmer

Catch up with your past, before it catches up with you.

Robert Penn Warren

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

Robert Penn Warren

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

Robert Penn Warren

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

Robert M. Pirsig

Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

Robert Evans

Let the wealth of remembrances past be the link of friendship treasured.

Robert E. Howard

I have put off the past like a worn-out cloak.

Walt Disney

Never get bored or cynical. Yesterday is a thing of the past.

Walt Disney

I love the nostalgic myself. I hope we never lose some of the things of the past.

Vinod Khosla

Future is not extrapolation of past

Walt Whitman

A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky, Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense.... [T]he wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain; But in my soul I plainly heard. Murmuring out of its myriad leaves, Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high, Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs—out of its foot-thick bark, That chant of the seasons and time—chant, not of the past only, but of the future...

Walt Whitman

The past, the future, majesty, love - if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

Saul Alinsky

The American people were, in the beginning, Revolutionaries and Tories. The American people ever since have been Revolutionaries and Tories. They have been Revolutionaries and Tories regardless of the labels of the past and present. Regardless of whether they were Federalists, Democrat-Republicans, Whigs, Know-Nothings, Free Soilers, Unionists or Confederates, Populists, Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Communists, or Progressives. They have been and are profiteers and patriots. They have been and are conservatives, liberals, and radicals.

Tom Perrotta

I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.

Tina St. John

No further issues with Corinne Bishop or her kin in Detroit?” “Hunter didn’t seem to be concerned,” Gideon replied. “Said he had the situation under control.” Lucan grunted, wry despite the weight of the discussion previously under way. “Where’ve I heard that line before? Famous last words from more than one of us over the course of the past year and a half.