A Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Quote Topics

Beauty Future Wisdom Abstract Past Promise Promise Of The Future

Quote Author

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
American - Writer
August 29, 1809 - October 7, 1894

People feel that the beauty of the Istanbul is something we used to have in the past or something we will have in the future. But we have that beauty today, too, in the mixture of past and future. We have to save it today and we have to enjoy it today.

Burhan Sonmez

My past is my wisdom to use today. . . my future is my wisdom yet to experience. Be in the present because that is where life resides.

Gene Oliver

We in ancient countries have our past- we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

Azar Nafisi

So time over time what will change the world, no one knows? The only promise is a day to live, to give and share with one another.? See the wisdom from mistakes in our past; the promise of a new day.?

Paula Abdul

Promise yourself you will talk health, happiness, and prosperity as often as possible. Promise to think only of the best, to work only for the best, and to expect only the best in yourself and others. Promise to forget the mistakes of the past and press on to greater achievements in the future.

John Wooden

Why is wisdom so fair? Why is beauty so wise? Because all else is temporary, while beauty and wisdom are the only real and constant aspects of truth that can be perceived by human means. And I don't mean the kind of surface beauty that fades with age, or the sort of shallow wisdom that gets lost in platitudes. True beauty grips your gut and squeezes your lungs, and makes you see with utmost clarity exactly what is before you. True wisdom then steps in, to interpret, illuminate, and form a life-altering insight.

Vera Nazarian

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.

Eckhart Tolle

The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes and its aspirations; before you lies the future-a future full of golden promise.

Jefferson Davis

These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

Vernon Cooper

Reason lives on the systematization of the past, but Faith is the promise of the future.

Christopher Dawson

Honour what is most beautiful about the past and build it into the promise of the future.

Jacqueline Novogratz

To understand the living present, and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past.

Rachel Carson

The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The Past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend. In the Past is no hope; The Future is both hope and fruition. The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.