Past Quotes - Page 96

Hindsight is not necessarily the best guide to understanding what really happened. The past is often as distorted by hindsight as it is clarified by it.

There are times, like after a long day of work, when the thought of an easy drive-through is enticing. But then I remember how crappy I felt when I ate fast food in the past, and it inspires me to head to the grocery store or my local farmer's market and whip up an easy but healthier option.

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

Through their capacity to manipulate symbols and to engage in reflective thought, people can generate novel ideas and innovative actions that transcend their past experiences

There ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a politcal and moral action.

If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

Until one looks back on one's own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has.

O my good lord, that comfort comes too late, 'Tis like a pardon after execution. That gentle physic, given in time, had cured me; But now I am past all comforts here but prayers.

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.

We will not allow the past to drag us down and stop us from moving ahead. We understand where we should move.

There is no crisis in cinema. There are negative periods. There are times when some films are received well and others aren't. The past teaches us that some films were received badly, while others go sailing on.

When I was 20, I thought anyone in the music business over 25 is past it. Then at 30, you think anyone still doing it at 35 is ridiculous. Suddenly, you find yourself at 48 and still doing it, so I dont know what to say, really.

Did either the nonexistent or the measured response after a series of attacks on Americans the past decade - in Lebanon, Africa, Saudi Arabia, New York, and Yemen - suggest to our terrorist enemies that it was wrong and unwise to kill reasonable and affable people, or did the easy killing imply that self-absorbed and pampered Lotus-eaters would not much care who or how many were butchered as long as it was within reasonable numbers and spread out over time?

Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause—and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess.

Have you set high standards in the past that make it clear what level of performance you demand?

The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind.

Do you hate me because I have magic?" "Of course not." "Do you love me despite my magic?" He thought a minute. "No. I love everything about you, and your magic is part of you. That was how I got past the Confessor's magic. If I had loved you despite your power, I wouldn't have been accepting you for who you are. Your magic would have destroyed me.

All night, this soft rain from The distant past. No wonder I sometimes Waken as a child.

time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.

The lessons of the past suggest that racism and resentment against people of color will continue to flourish in America as long as the history that is taught transposes the heroes and the villains. That is the unspoken truth at the heart of the nation's racial divide.

The past should not be a place where we live, but something from which we learn.

CSETI (The Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has in the past 18 months succeeded in intentionally establishing contact with extraterrestrial spacecraft, on two occasions at very close range, and with multiple witnesses present.

Conditioned Awareness is where we live our lives in guilt over the past and anxiety over the future and never get to experience the present.

Don't regret what's happened. If it's in the past, LET IT GO. Don't even remember it!

She remembered him smiling, and realized that time, that great old healer, had finally accomplished its work, and now, across the years, the face of love no longer stirred up agonies of grief and bitterness. Rather, one was left feeling simply grateful. For how unimaginably empty the past would be without him to remember.