A Quote by Peter Ackroyd

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

Peter Ackroyd

Quote Topics

Around Believe Don't Believe Eternal In The Past Necessarily Past Us

Quote Author

Peter Ackroyd
British - Novelist
Born: October 5, 1949

Do not be attached to the past or wait for the future. Be grateful for each day, that is enough. I do not believe in a future world, I deny the past. I believe entirely in the present. Employ your entire body and mind in the eternal now.

Santoka Taneda

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.

George Steiner

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

Yukio Mishima

There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I don't believe in living in the past. Living in the past is for cowards. If you live in the past, you die in the past.

Mike Ditka

But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past - or more accurately, pastness - is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Regret for a sinful past will remain until we truly believe that for us in Christ that sinful past no longer exists.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

The past is an interpretation. The future is on illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead, time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.

Shams Tabrizi

We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use to the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It's always new.

Paulo Coelho

It seems to me that the dedication of a library is an act of faith. To bring together the resources of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. it must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We think that the world is limited and explained by its past. We tend to think that what happened in the past determines what is going to happen next, and we do not see that it is exactly the other way around! What is always the source of the world is the present; the past doesn't explain a thing. The past trails behind the present like the wake of a ship and eventually disappears.

Alan Watts

The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

Walt Whitman

I think the past is something I have spent a lot of time thinking about, not only what is different about the past but what's the same, and what links us to the past.

Sharon Cameron

Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.

Lawrence Lessig

I'm just honest about the things I believe in. For instance, I went to a past-life regressionist, and he told me that in my past life I was assassinated. I'm pretty sure that I was JFK in my past life.