Top 1200 Our Past Quotes & Sayings - Page 17

We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in the future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act.

I am not a video game guy at all. Once it got past Super Mario Bros. and past two buttons, they lost me. I was like, 'I do not have the abilities to be able to do this. It doesn't work.'

To consider the matter aright, reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas, and endows them with particular qualities, according to their particular situations and relations. This instinct, 'tis true, arises from past observation and experience; but can anyone give the ultimate reason, why past experience and observation produces such an effect, any more than why nature alone should produce it?

Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)

Populists and isolationists ignore the tangible benefits that have resulted from our active international role during the past half-century.

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.

What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names - now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache. We don't remember the dream, but the dream remembers us. It is there all day as an animal is there under the table, as the stars are there.

I have full faith in my people that they will rise to every occasion worthy of our past Islamic history, glory and traditions.

In just the past century we have almost doubled the percentage of fat in our diets--from 20% in 1910 to about 35% today.

Too many of us are not living our dreams, because we are living our fears. Decide to become fearless. Face the thing you fear the most. You're stronger than you give yourself credit for. If you can laugh at it. You can move past it. You have the ability to do more than you have ever hoped, imagined or dreamed. You have GREATNESS within you!

Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past without looking forward to the future.

We line our lives with beautiful things to create a cushion of stability: the illusion of a cohesive past, the promise of an unclouded future.

A majority of Americans want redemption for racism - for our terrible, destructive racist past - and so see a vote for Obama as redemptive.

Certainly being governor is an important job, and there are quality governors that could serve our country as president and have done so in the past.

In the past, when we were initially organizing to bring about changes, our elders had little or no political experience. However, today, most of those American Indian Movement organ-izers are the elders. They are quite adept at bringing attention to the public about any attacks upon our people.

Our days of praise shall ne'er be past While life, and thought, and being last, And immortality endures.

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.

Digging back through the events of the past, I found that there have been all sorts of people who had a greater effect on us than our own fathers. Perhaps an adult that we wanted to become like, or someone with such a strong presence that even now, they remain in our hearts - someone who might be referred to as a "father of choice."

Our behaviour as an athlete is often determined by our previous experiences and how we dealt with those experiences. It is these experiences from past performances that can often shape what will happen in the future. It is for this reason that you learn and move on to be more mentally stronger as both an athlete and as a human!

Secrets of the past! Who does not wish to keep the past locked in a cage like a ferocious beast? The rich are sleepless for fear of thieves. The respectable have to guard their reputations in the same way.

Although I was well past my teenage troubles, our music was specifically designed to lubricate the passage from adolescence to adulthood.

'One Yellow Daffodil' is both a look to the past and to the future and expresses my belief in the great spirit and strength of our children.

Memory is not a simple replay. The bits of information that we recover from the past are often influenced by our knowledge, beliefs and feelings.

We can actually reconstruct our past by examining what we think, say, feel, expect, believe, and do in an intimate relationship now.

Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him? Citizens ask, What do they mean to us? Historians are trained to seek the original meaning; all of us want to know the present meaning.

It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present.

Whoever we may be, whatever our immediate interest, however much we carry baggage from our past, however much we have been caught by the fashion of cynicism and loss of faith in the capacity of the people, let us err today and say - nothing can stop us now!

An example is often a deceptive mirror, and the order of destiny, so troubling to our thoughts, is not always found written in things past.

Ireland and its people have much to be proud of. Yet every land and its people have moments of shame. Dealing with the failures of our past, as a country, as a Church, or as an individual is never easy. Our struggle to heal the wounds of decades of violence, injury and painful memory in Northern Ireland are more than ample evidence of this.

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

We rarely know who our ancestors were. Who can even remember the names of their great-grandparents? They have vanished into the dim and distant past

How strange it is that we of the present day are constantly praising that past age which our fathers abused, and as constantly abusing that present age, which our children will praise.

How beautiful the yesterday that stood Over me like a rainbow! I am alone, The past is past. I see the future stretch All dark and barren as a rainy sea.

Oil is largely our energy past, and Keystone does little to respond to the actual challenges and opportunities before us.

We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.

Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

The moment we're born they try to make us cry, and sometimes it seems as though they never stop. Most of us go to our grave with our music still inside of us. Never borrow sorrow from tomorrow! No matter what a man's past may have been, his future is spotless.

Because photos are testimony that someone did live. A reminder of past we may have loved or hated. A piece of our lives.

To Toronto City Council: The Sam The Record Man store and sign were important fixtures in Toronto's musical landscape as well as its Civic history. Sadly, all that remains now are our memories of the store and this magnificant neon sign. Ryerson and they City of Toronto should absolutely preserve what myself and many of its citizens consider to be an important symbol of our past and of that store's contributions to our culture.

An example is often a deceptive mirror, and the order of destiny, so troubling to our thoughts, is not always found written in things past

The rule is: we cannot really forgive ourselves unless we look at the failure in our past and call it by its right name.

We all have something in our past that is gripping us, and 'Violet' is very much about leaving those things behind.

Truth is a torch but a tremendous one. That is why we hurry past it, shielding our eyes, indeed, in fear of getting burned.

We have our own script. We have our own calendar. We represent the greatness of Africa's past. We also represent the worst of Africa's present, in terms of poverty. It is the best and the worst of African reality.

Is there any progress in horticulture? If not, it is dead, uninspiring. We cannot live in the past good as it is; we must draw our inspiration from the future.

In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.

Through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.

Sometimes people can't see past us to hear our message. We never have a second chance to leave a first impression.

From politics and business to music and food to culture, African-Americans have helped to shape our state's colourful past and its future.

I'm very nostalgic, and I spend a lot of time in the past, in my mind. That's part of my challenge, and what I really want to do is, I want to be present. I want to leave that in the past. When I say nostalgic, I mean my own life. I spend a lot of time reflecting on my past and not being able to process time.

India and the United States have taken a decisive step, away from the past. The dawn of the new century has marked a new beginning in our relations. Let us work to fulfil this promise and the hope of today. Let us remove the shadow of agitation that lies between us and our joint vision.

Our post-war generation were struggling to escape the past and the burden of guilt we carried and to find a new way.

The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them.

We must not allow the liberals to move us away from the conservative values of the American past which sustain our present and shall secure our future. As for me and my family, we will serve God, we will serve this constitutional republic, we will serve America.

God is able to take the mess of our past and turn it into a message. He takes the trials and tests and turns them into a testimony.

We cannot live in the past, nor can we re-create it. Yet as we unravel the past, the future also unfolds before us, as though they are mirrors without which neither can be seen or happen.

Our educational establishment is failing; it is past time for courage, honesty, and action commensurate with the need, particularly here in the United States.