A Quote by Robertson Davies
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
Related Quotes
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.
Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
The time has come when we cannot be so careless. Unless we do better, we may suffer through a stark emergency of the environment. We may create a hostile world: a world to bruise ourselves against; a world of sprawling cities, unplanned or badly planned; a world whose water is full of sludge, whose winds are full of soot; a world whose landscape has been totally neglected, stripped, marred, and wasted. All of this need not happen if we choose well, and particularly if we plan well and if we act well.
There are times when one's life appears to be a stage. People come, people go. They come in order to go, and go with no intent of return. When they return, they return as one's past. A past that would make you feel that the present is false.
Happiness is the intoxication produced by the moment of poise between a satisfactory past and an immediate future, rich with promise.
I think it's easy to hold on to this romantic hope that communities such as Niaqornat won't change, because we're in this world where progress is unstoppable, and they're a link to some idealised past.
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.
Live in the present and shape the future, do not be casting lingering looks to the distant past for the past has passed away, never again to return.
We're at a historical juncture: A growing number of people are declaring what has been achieved over the past decades in Europe to be wrong. They want to return to the nation-state. Sometimes there is even a blood and soil rhetoric that for me is starkly reminiscent of the interwar years of the past century, whose demons we are still all too familiar with.
We are comfortable with the fact that we cannot know personally what happened in the world before we were born, yet we are uncomfortable with the notion that we will stop engaging with time at some point in the future.
Mankind in Amnesia has to do not only with the past, like my other books -- primarily it has to do with the future, a future not removed by thousands or tens of thousands of years, but the imminent future, on whose threshold we now stand.
I've been bothered about time generally and our tripartite division of time into past, present, and future. I think I know what the past is, and I think I know what future is, but I'm really not comfortable with the notion of present.
The notion that somehow through a trade war or protectionism or magical thinking that we're going to return to a romanticized economic past is, in the end, going to be an illusion. And a severe disappointment to millions of decent, hard-working people.
To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?
Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ. Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.
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