We will have to choose not between color nor race nor religion nor between East and West either, but simply between being slaves and being free. And we will have to choose completely and for good; the time is already past now when we can choose a little of each, a little of both. We can choose a state of slavedom, and if we are powerful enough to be among the top two or three or ten, we can have a certain amount of license — until someone more powerful rises and has us machine-gunned against a cellar wall. [ Harper’s Magazine , June, 1956.]
What is past is past. There is a future left to all men, who have the virtue to repent and the energy to atone.
The past at least is secure.
Dum deliberamus quando incipiendum incipere jam serum est=--While we are deliberating to begin, the time to begin is past.
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste.
Die Zeiten der Vergangenheit / Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln; / Was Ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst / Das ist im Grund' der Herrn eigner Geist, / In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln=--The times that are past are a book with seven seals. What ye call the spirit of the times is at bottom but the spirit of the gentry in which the times are mirrored.
And o'er the past Oblivion stretch her wing.
We buy wisdom with happiness, and who would purchase it at such a price? To be happy we must forget the past, and think not of the future; and who that has a soul or mind can do this? No one; and this proves that those who have either know no happiness on this earth. Memory precludes happiness, whatever Rogers may say or write to the contrary, for it borrows from the past to embitter the present, bringing back to us all the grief that has most wounded, or the happiness that has most charmed us.--_Byron._
He lives twice who can at once employ / The present well and e'en the past enjoy.
The past is an unfathomable depth, / Beyond the span of thought; 'tis an elapse / Which hath no mensuration, but hath been / For ever and for ever.
Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
Direct proof may be given that some parts of the land of the northern hemisphere are at this moment insensibly rising and others insensibly sinking; and there is indirect, but perfectly satisfactory, proof, that an enormous area now covered by the Pacific has been deepened thousands of feet, since the present inhabitants of that sea came into existence. Thus there is not a shadow of a reason for believing that the physical changes of the globe, in past times, have been effected by other than natural causes.
O my soul, it is not only after the future thou must aspire; thou must aspire to see the glory of thy past. Thou must find the glory of that way by which thy God has led thee, and be able even of thy sorrow to say, "This was the gate of heaven!"--_George Matheson._
When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.
I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
Suavis est laborum pr?teritorum memoria=--Sweet is the memory of past trouble.
While modern evangelical Christianity has undeniable historical roots, its explosion over the past thirty years is a triumph of the Gospel According to Wal-Mart.
Keep in mind that people change, but the past doesn't.
That which is past is gone and irrevocable, and wise men have enough to do with things present and to come; therefore they do but trifle with themselves that labour in past matters.
I know no judgment of the future but by the past.
When looking for the path to peace one comes to realize that peace is the path." Peace can only be achieved by letting go of the past and accepting what is. But one can only do that if he practices forgiveness. ~ UNIVERSE LOVES YOU & SO DO I ❤ #StardustAK ❤
~Opinion.~--The men of the past had convictions, while we moderns have only opinions.--_Heinrich Heine._
To mourn a mischief that is past and gone, / Is the next way to draw new mischief on.
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.
Hoc est / Vivere bis, vita posse priore frui=--To be able to enjoy one's past life is to live twice.
One of the old man's miseries is that he cannot easily find a companion able to partake with him of the past.
The highest which man can comprehend is man. One step only he may go beyond, and say that what is beyond may be different, but it cannot be less perfect than the present; the future cannot be worse than the past.... That much-decried philosophy of evolution, if it teaches us anything, teaches us a firm belief in a better future, and in a higher perfection which man is destined to reach.
People come, people go – they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past.
For he lives twice who can at once employ The present well, and e'en the past enjoy.
If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
The Flag links up the past and the present. It is the legacy bequeathed to us by the architects of our liberty. … The world is full of misunderstandings, suspicions and distrusts. In these difficult days it depends on us under what banner we fight. Here we are Putting in the very centre the white, the white of the Sun's rays. The white means the path of light … the ideal light, the light of truth … The Asoka's wheel represents to us the wheel of the Law, the wheel Dharma. Truth can be gained only by the pursuit of the path of Dharma, by the practice of virtue. ...the orange, the Bhagwa colour, represents the spirit of renunciation. All forms of renunciation are to be embodied in Raja Dharma. … Our leaders must be disinterested. They must be dedicated spirits … the green is there, our relation to the soil, our relation to the plant life here, on which all other life depends. We must build our Paradise, here on this green earth... This flag tells us "Be ever alert, be ever on the move, go forward, work for a free, flexible, compassionate, decent, democratic society in which Christians, Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists will all find a safe shelter." Let us all unite under this banner and rededicate ourselves to the ideas our flag symbolizes.
_Iago._ What, are you hurt, lieutenant? _Cas._ Ay, past all surgery.
Of what is to come, what is in store for us, we know nothing; and the more we know that, the greater and stronger our faith. It must be right, it cannot be wrong. Why was the past often so beautiful? Because all tends to beauty, to perfection, and the highest point of perfection is love. We are far from that here, yet all the miseries of this life, or many at least, would vanish before love. Life seems most unnatural in what we call the most highly civilised countries--the struggle of life is fiercest there. Rest and love seem impossible, and yet that is what we are yearning for, and it may be granted us hereafter.
People are wise for the past day in the evening, but never wise enough for the coming one.
What 's gone and what 's past help Should be past grief.
Religion is not the simple fire-escape that you build in anticipation of a possible danger, upon the outside of your dwelling, and leave there until danger comes. You go to it some morning when a fire breaks out in your house, and the poor old thing that you built up there, and thought that you could use some day, is so rusty and broken, and the weather has so beaten upon it and the sun so turned its hinges, that it will not work. That is the condition of a man who has built himself what seems a creed of faith, a trust in God in anticipation of the day when danger is to overtake him, and has said to himself, I am safe, for I will take refuge in it then. But religion is the house in which we live, it is the table at which we sit, it is the fireside at which we draw near, the room that arches its graceful and familiar presence over us; it is the bed on which we lie and think of the past, and anticipate the future, and gather our refreshment.--_Phillips Brooks._
If we do a thing because we think it is our duty, we generally fail; that is the old law which makes slaves of us. The real spring of our life, and of our work in life, must be love--true, deep love--not love of this or that person, or for this or that reason, but deep human love, devotion of soul to soul, love of God realised where alone it can be, in love of those whom He loves. Everything else is weak, passes away; that love alone supports us, makes life tolerable, binds the present together with the past and future, and is, we may trust, imperishable.
The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected. Maybe they always have been and will be. Maybe we've lived a thousand lives before this one and in each of them we've found each other. And maybe each time, we've been forced apart for the same reasons. That means that this goodbye is both a goodbye for the past ten thousand years and a prelude to what will come.
Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.
The painter's work will be of little merit if he takes the painting of others as his standard, but if he studies from nature he will produce good fruits; as is seen in the case of the painters of the age after the Romans, who continued to imitate one another and whose art consequently declined from age to age. After these came Giotto the Florentine, who was born in the lonely mountains, inhabited only by goats and similar animals; and he, being drawn to his art by nature, began to draw on the rocks the doings of the goats of which he was the keeper; and thus he likewise began to draw all the animals which he met with in the country: so that after long study he surpassed not only all the masters of his age, but all those of many past centuries. After him art relapsed once more, because all artists imitated the painted pictures, and thus from century to century it went on declining, until Tomaso the Florentine, called Masaccio, proved by his perfect work that they who set up for themselves a standard other than nature, the mistress of all masters, labour in vain.
It is certainly not then — not in dreams — but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.
Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
'T is greatly wise to talk with our past hours, And ask them what report they bore to heaven.
We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.
Remembrance makes the poet; 'tis the past, / Lingering within him with a keener sense / Than is upon the thoughts of common men, / Of what has been, that fills the actual world / With unreal likenesses of lovely shapes, / That were and are not.
When remedies are past, the griefs are ended / By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended.
Let fate do her worst; there are moments of joy, / Bright dreams of the past, which she cannot destroy; / Which come in the nighttime of sorrow and care, / And bring back the features that joy used to wear.
Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize — because they set so little store by them — the immense riches accumulated by the human race on either side of the narrow furrow on which they keep their eyes fixed; by underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.
When Time who steals our years away Shall steal our pleasures too, The mem'ry of the past will stay, And half our joys renew.
O nimm der Stunde wahr, eh' sie entschlupft. / So selten kommt der Augenblick im Leben / Der wahrhaft wichtig ist und gross=--Take note of the hour ere it slips past; so seldom does the moment come which is truly fateful and great.
Hier ist keine Heimat--Jeder treibt / Sich an dem andern rasch und fremd voruber, / Und fragt nicht nach seinem Schmerz=--Here is no home for a man: every one drives past another hastily and unneighbourly, and inquires not after his pain.
By the students of the science of religion the Old Testament can only be looked upon as a strictly historical book by the side of other historical books. It can claim no privilege before the tribunal of history, nay, to claim such a privilege would be to really deprive it of the high position which it justly holds among the most valuable monuments of the distant past. But the authorship of the single books which form the Old Testament, and more particularly the dates at which they were reduced to writing, form the subject of keen controversy, not among critics hostile to religion, but among theologians who treat these questions in the most independent, but at the same time the most candid and judicial, spirit. By this treatment many difficulties, which in former times disturbed the minds of thoughtful theologians, have been removed, and the Old Testament has resumed its rightful place among the most valuable monuments of antiquity.... But this was possible on one condition only, namely, that the Old Testament should be treated simply as an historical book, willing to submit to all the tests of historical criticism to which other historical books have submitted.
As the youth lives in the future, so the man lives with the past; no one knows rightly how to live in the present.
The past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it.
For you and I are past our dancing days.
I am convinced that there is no man that knows life well, and remembers all the incidents of his past existence, who would accept it again; we are certainly here to punish precedent sins.--_Campbell._
The creation and the deluge being past, and God not intending any more to destroy the world, nor to create it anew, nor to give any such great proofs of himself, he began to establish a people on the earth, formed of set purpose, which should last until the coming of that people whom Messiah should mould by his spirit.
Let any man compare his present fortune with the past, and he will probably find himself, upon the whole, neither better nor worse than formerly.
If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.
Hor? cedunt, et dies, et menses, et anni, nec pr?teritum tempus unquam revertitur=--Hours and days, months and years, pass away, and time once past never returns.
One thing I’ve learned in these past few months is that love isn’t just a feeling. Love is a choice because feelings come and go. But loving you is my decision for life.
There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions and social structure are changing in consequence. It promises a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty — a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land. This is the revolution of the new generation.
This, Christian, is what you must do. Sometimes, like Paul, you can see neither sun nor stars, and no small tempest lies on you; and then you can do but one thing; there is only one way. Reason cannot help you. Past experiences give you no light. Even prayer fetches no consolation. Only a single course is left. You must put your soul in one position and keep it there. You must stay upon the Lord; and, come what may--winds, waves, cross seas, thunder, lightning, frowning rocks, roaring breakers--no matter what, you must lash yourself to the helm, and hold fast your confidence in God's faithfulness, His covenant engagement, His everlasting love in Christ Jesus.--_Richard Fuller._
We live in a time of transition, an uneasy era which is likely to endure for the rest of this century. During the period we may be tempted to abandon some of the time-honored principles and commitments which have been proven during the difficult times of past generations. We must never yield to this temptation. Our American values are not luxuries, but necessities — not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself.
When the shore is won at last, / Who will count the billows past?
Nor can either thy own resentment of misfortunes within, or the violence of any calamity without, give thee sufficient grounds, from the terrible face thy present circumstances wear, to pronounce that all hope of escape and better days are past.
The shift is not toward complacency: we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time.
Two thousand five hundred years ago the value of civilization was as apparent as it is now; then, as now, it was obvious that only in the garden of an orderly polity can the finest fruits humanity is capable of bearing be produced. But it had also become evident that the blessings of culture were not unmixed. The garden was apt to turn into a hothouse. The stimulation of the senses, the pampering of the emotions, endlessly multiplied the sources of pleasure. The constant widening of the intellectual field indefinitely extended the range of that especially human faculty of looking before and after, which adds to the fleeting present those old and new worlds of the past and the future, wherein men dwell the more the higher their culture. But that very sharpening of the sense and that subtle refinement of emotion, which brought such a wealth of pleasures, were fatally attended by a proportional enlargement of the capacity for suffering; and the divine faculty of imagination, while it created new heavens and new earths, provided them with the corresponding hells of futile regret for the past and morbid anxiety for the future.
Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.
Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.
Think not that guilt requires the burning torches of the Furies to agitate and torment it. Frauds, crimes, remembrances of the past, terrors of the future,--these are the domestic Furies that are ever present to the mind of the impious.--_Cicero._
They say I'm old-fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast!
Every loving woman is a priestess of the past.
Come to the sunset tree! The day is past and gone; The woodman's axe lies free, And the reaper's work is done.
Dear God, My heart is heavy from my past mistakes. There’s been times in my life I’ve caused others pain. I ask that today you set me free, and lift this weight off my heart. I know you forgive me Father, but I need to learn how to forgive myself. Let the burden of my self-doubt and guilt be lifted. In Jesus name I pray. Amen.
Under all sorrow there is the force of virtue; over all ruin, the restoring charity of God. To these alone we have to look; in these alone we may understand the past, and predict the future destiny of the ages.
No one is perfect, Jet. We all have things that have happened, that are going to happen that make us who we are, and maybe you need to look past all the superficial stuff you see when you look at this girl and see what’s underneath.
Nulla ?tas ad perdiscendum est=--There is no time of life past learning something.
The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil, the future the virgin's.
The sole terms on which the past can become ours are its subordination to the present.
Hard I strove To put away my immortality, Till my collected spirits swell'd my heart Almost to bursting; but the strife is past. It is a fearful thing to be a god, And, like a god, endure a mortal's pain; To be a show for earth and wondering heaven To gaze and shudder at! But I will live, That Jove may know there is a deathless soul Who ne'er will be his subject. Yes, 'tis past. The stedfast Fates confess my absolute will, — Their own co-equal.
_The Misery of Man._--We care nothing for the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if we could make it move faster; or we call back the past, to stop its rapid flight. So imprudent are we that we wander through the times in which we have no part, unthinking of that which alone is ours; so frivolous are we that we dream of the days which are not, and pass by without reflection those which alone exist. For the present generally gives us pain; we conceal it from our sight because it afflicts us, and if it be pleasant we regret to see it vanish away. We endeavour to sustain the present by the future, and think of arranging things not in our power, for a time at which we have no certainty of arriving.
Tho' lost to sight, to mem'ry dear Thou ever wilt remain; One only hope my heart can cheer,-- The hope to meet again. Oh fondly on the past I dwell, And oft recall those hours When, wand'ring down the shady dell, We gathered the wild-flowers. Yes, life then seem'd one pure delight, Tho' now each spot looks drear; Yet tho' thy smile be lost to sight, To mem'ry thou art dear. Oft in the tranquil hour of night, When stars illume the sky, I gaze upon each orb of light, And wish that thou wert by. I think upon that happy time, That time so fondly lov'd, When last we heard the sweet bells chime, As thro' the fields we rov'd. Yes, life then seem'd one pure delight, Tho' now each spot looks drear; Yet tho' thy smile be lost to sight, To mem'ry thou art dear.
We all were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again: And by that destiny, to perform an act Whereof what's past is prologue, what to come In yours and my discharge.
Animus quod perdidit optat / Atque in pr?terita se totus imagine versat=--The mind yearns after what is gone, and loses itself in dreaming of the past.
I dreamt the past was never past redeeming: But whether this was false or honest dreaming I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.
Or, the ethnologist may turn to the study of the practical life of men; and relying upon the inherent conservatism and small inventiveness of untutored mankind, he may hope to discover in manners and customs, or in weapons, dwellings, and other handiwork, a clue to the origin of the resemblances and differences of nations. Or, he may resort to that kind of evidence which is yielded by History proper, and consists of the beliefs of men concerning past events, embodied in traditional, or in written, testimony. Or, when that thread breaks, Archaeology, which is the interpretation of the unrecorded remains of man's works, belonging to the epoch since the world has reached its present condition, may still guide him. And, when even the dim light of archaeology fades, there yet remains Palaeontology which, in these latter years, has brought to daylight once more the exuvia of ancient populations, whose world was not our world, who have been buried in river beds immemorially dry, or carried by the rush of waters into caves, inaccessible to inundation since the dawn of tradition.