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.
To be a member, is to have neither life, being, nor movement save by the spirit of the body, and for the body; the separate member, seeing no longer the body to which it belongs, has only a waning and dying existence. Yet it believes it is a whole, and seeing not the body on which it depends, it believes it depends only on self and wills to constitute itself both centre and body. But not having in itself a principle of life, it only goes astray, and is astonished in the uncertainty of its being; fully aware that it is not a body, yet not seeing that it is a member of a body. Then when at last it arrives at the knowledge of self, it has returned as it were to its own home, and loves itself only for the body's sake, bewailing that in the past it has gone astray.
Every brave life out of the past does not appear to us so brave as it really was, for the forms of terror with which it wrestled are now overthrown.
Academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should be simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.
I would like to make the point that we cannot undo the past but we can learn from it, and we cannot predict the future but we can shape and build it.
You will find, as you look back upon your life, that the moments that stand out, the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love. As memory scans the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life there leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life. The Greatest Thing in the World, p. 60.
2 Saint Peter ii. False prophets in the past the image of the future.
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.
The moment which is the cradle of the future is also the grave of the past.
The sole terms on which the past can become ours are its subordination to the present.
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 golden age, that lovely prime, / Existed in the past no more than now. / And did it e'er exist, believe me, / As then it was, it now may be restored. Still meet congenial spirits, and enhance / Each other's pleasures in this beauteous world.
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.
Remembrance wakes with all her busy train, / Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain.
A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science, with modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search.
Not heaven itself upon the past has power; / But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
If the invention of derivatives was the financial world's modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstrucitonism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always 'deferred,' moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an 'aporia,' from a Greek term meaning 'impasse.' There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect.
You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.
But over the past few months, I'd come to see my rig for what it was: an elaborate contraption for deceiving my senses, to allow me to live in a world that didn't exist. Each component of my rig was a bar in a cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself.
You will find, as you look back upon your life, that the moments that stand out, the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love. As memory scans the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life, there leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life. The Greatest Thing in the World, p. 60.
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.
Man's obligations do not tend toward the past. We know of nothing that binds us to what is behind: our duty lies ahead.
If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.
Look not mournfully into the past--it comes not back again; wisely improve the present--it is thine; go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.
Man is the measurer of all things; and what is Science but the reflection of the outer world on the mirror of the mind, growing more perfect, more orderly, more definite, more great, with every generation? To attempt to study nature without studying man is as impossible as to study light without studying the eye. I have no misgivings, therefore, that the lines on which this College (Mason Science College) is founded will ever become so narrow as to exclude the science of man, and the science of that which makes man, the science of language, and, what is really the same, the science of thought. And where can we study the science of thought, that most wonderful instance of development, except in the languages and literatures of the past? How are we to do justice to our ancestors except by letting them plead their own case in their own language? Literary culture can far better dispense with physical science than physical science with literary culture, though nothing is more satisfactory than a perfect combination of the two.
The most common actions of life, its every day and hour, are invested with the highest grandeur, when we think how they extend their issues into eternity. Our hands are now sowing seeds for that great harvest. We shall meet again all we are doing and have done. The graves shall give up their dead, and from the tombs of oblivion the past shall give up all that it holds in keeping, to bear true witness for or against us.--_Guthrie._
~Repentance.~---Repentance clothes in grass and flowers the grave in which the past is laid.--_Sterling._
I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston and Concord and Lexington and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever.
For he lives twice who can at once employ The present well, and e'en the past enjoy.
They say I'm old-fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast!
The mind of man is capable of anything — because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage — who can tell? — but truth — truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder — the man knows, and can look on without a wink.
You can never plan the future by the past.
The fiending for a state of stasis, for the safety of childhood and the nostalgia of the madeleine in the tea or an eternal library is not too far removed from the desire for death. The idealizing of the past is a kind of death.
It may be said, almost without qualification, that true wisdom consists in the ready and accurate perception of analogies. Without the former quality, knowledge of the past is uninstructive; without the latter, it is deceptive.--_Whately._
We are drunk on our own ideas. To sober up, take a step back every now and then and examine their quality in hindsight. Which of your ideas from the past ten years were truly outstanding? Exactly.
Lasst fahren hin das allzu Fluchtige! / Ihr sucht bei ihm vergebens Rat! / In dem Vergangnen lebt das Tuchtige / Verewigt sich in schoner That=--Let the too transient pass by; ye seek counsel in vain of it. Yet what will avail you lives in the past, and lies immortalised in what has been nobly done.
For a man can lose neither the past nor the future; for how can one take from him that which is not his? So remember these two points: first, that each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle, and that it signifies not whether a man shall look upon the same things for a hundred years or two hundred, or for an infinity of time; second, that the longest lived and the shortest lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.
What poet will place before thee in words, O {69} lover, the true semblance of thy idea with such truth as will the painter? Who is he who will show thee rivers, woods, valleys and plains, which will recall to thee the pleasures of the past, with greater truth than the painter? And if thou sayest that painting is mute poetry in itself, unless there be some one to speak for it and tell what it represents--seest thou not, then, that thy book is on a lower plane? Because even if it have a man to speak for it, nothing of the subject which is related can be seen, as it is seen when a picture is explained. And the pictures, if the action represented and the mental attributes of the figures are in the true proportion one to another, will be understood in the same way as if they spoke.
This narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless seas, The past, the future,--two eternities!
A different conception of society, very different from that which now prevails, is in process of formation. … Acknowledging, as a fact, the equal rights of all its members to the treasures accumulated in the past … it seeks to establish a certain harmonious compatibility in its midst — not by subjecting all its members to an authority that is fictitiously supposed to represent society, not by trying to establish uniformity, but by urging all men to develop free initiative, free action, free association.
I watch the wheels of Nature's mazy plan, / And learn the future by the past of man.
We will not anticipate the past; so mind, young people,--our retrospection will be all to the future.
Children see in their parents the past, they again in their children the future; and if we find more love in parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad indeed, but natural. Who does not fondle his hopes more than his recollections?
For he lives twice who can at once employ / The present well and e'en the past enjoy.
Life — a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.
Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own; He who, secure within, can say, Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today. Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine, The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine. Not heaven itself upon the past has power; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
Only art can make the future love you, and that is what art is about: attraction at a distance, seduction from the past, inveiglement from beyond the grave.
And o'er the past Oblivion stretch her wing.
I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
When we look back upon human records, how the eye settles upon writers as the main landmarks of the past.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
Despise anxiety and wishing, the past and the future.
When We Want God to Breathe New Life into Our Marriage Do not remember the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. ISAIAH 43:18-19 WE ALL HAVE TIMES when we know we need new life in our marriage. We feel the strain, the tension, the sameness, or possibly even the subtle decay in it. When there is so much water under the bridge over what seems like a river of hurt, apathy, or preoccupation, we know we cannot survive the slowly and steadily rising flood without the Lord doing a new thing in both of us. The good news is that God says He will do that. He is the God of new beginnings, after all. But it won’t happen if we don’t make a choice to let go of the past. We have been made new if we have received Jesus. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). But in a marriage, it is way too easy to hang on to the old disappointments, misunderstandings, disagreements, and abuses. It becomes a wilderness of hurtful memories we cling to because we don’t want to be hurt, disappointed, misunderstood, disregarded, fought with, or abused again. Hanging on to old patterns of thought and negative memories keeps them fresh in your mind. And you don’t let your husband forget them, either. You remain mired in them because you don’t feel the situation has been resolved—and it still hurts. Only God can give you and your husband a new beginning from all that has gone on in the past. Only He can make a road in the wilderness of miscommunication and misread intentions, and make a cleansing and restoring river to flow in the dry areas of your relationship. Everyone needs new life in their marriage at certain times. And only the God of renewal can accomplish that. My Prayer to God LORD, I ask that You would do a fresh work of Your Spirit in our marriage. Make all things new in each of us individually and also together. Dissolve the pain of the past where it is still rising up in us to stifle our communication and ultimately our hope and joy. Wherever we have felt trapped in a wilderness of our own making, carve a way out of it for us and show us the path to follow. If there are rigid and dry areas between us that don’t allow for new growth, give us a fresh flow of Your Spirit to bring new vitality into our relationship. Help us to stop rehearsing old hurtful conversations that have no place in any life committed to the God of new beginnings. Sweep away all the old rubble of selfishness, stubbornness, blindness, and the inability to see beyond the moment or a particular situation. Only You can take away our painful memories so that we don’t keep reliving the same problems, hurts, or injustices. Only You can resurrect love, excitement, and hope where they have died. Help us to forgive fully and allow each other to completely forget. Help us to focus on Your greatness in us, instead of each other’s faults. Holy Spirit, breathe new life into each of us and into our marriage today.
Faith is more basic than language or theology. Faith is the response to something which is calling us from the timeless part of our reality. Faith may be encouraged by what has happened in the past, or what is thought to have happened in the past, but the only proof of it is in the future. Scriptures and creeds may come to seem incredible, but faith will still go dancing on. Even though (because it rejects a doctrine) it is now described as "doubt". This, I believe, is the kind of faith that Christ commended.
Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of the lightning, at once exists and expires.
And he listened yet more intently to what was within him, to the past, to see whether that voice of memory truly foretelling the future would not speak to him again, revealing the present to him as well as the past.
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 have something to tell you today. Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life — for the past five years.
Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.
Because this is what happens when you try to run from the past. It just doesn’t catch up, it overtakes … blotting out the future.
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.
He lives twice who can at once employ / The present well and e'en the past enjoy.
The great source of calamity lies in regret or anticipation; he therefore is most wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or the future.
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.
Live in the present, remember the past, and fear not the future, for it doesn't exist and never shall. There is only now.
It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
The historian is a prophet with his face directed to the past.
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.
That which is called nothingness is found only in time and in words: in time it is found in the past and future, and not in the present; and thus in words among things which are said to be nonexistent or impossible. In time nothingness dwells in the past and the future, and not at all in the present, and in nature it resides among the things {185} which are impossible. Whence from that which has been said, it has no being, because where there is nothingness there would be a vacuum.
The promise given was a necessity of the past; the word broken is a necessity of the present.
What is past, present, future? Is it not all one? only the past and the future somewhere where at present we cannot be. Wait a little time, and the eternal will take the place of the present,--and we shall have the past again,--for the past is not lost. Nothing is lost--but this waiting is sometimes very hard, and this longing very hard. Friends go on all sides, it seems a different world, yet there is work to do, and there is much left to love.
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.
The second he to whom life's sum Is self at ease; who never lets The past disturb with dark regrets, Nor hopes and fears from days to come.
Revolutions are not made; they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back.
Keep in mind that people change, but the past doesn't.
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._
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.
All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.
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.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Nothing done by man in the past has any deeper sense than what he is doing now.
Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past.
This narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless seas, / The past, the future--two eternities.
I know no judgment of the future but by the past.
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new; an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking, is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, "Anyone can cook". But I realize — only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more.