Top 1200 People From The Past Quotes & Sayings

If you cannot free people from their wrongs and see them as the needy people they are, you enslave yourself to your own painful past and by fastening yourself to the past, you let your hate become your future.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

Widge can see the past." Poppet says suddenly. "That's why his stories are so good." "The past is easier," Widget says. "It's already there." "In the stars?" Bailey asks. "No." Widget says. "On people. The past stays on you the way powdered sugar stays on fingers. Some people can get rid of it but it's still there, the events and t hings that pushed you to where you are now.

What 'Floating Worlds' does draw on is Holland's artistry in bringing the past to life in her historical fiction and depicting the people who inhabited that past.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

German people get very uptight if you mention World War II. Germans today feel that what's past is past, new generations don't really remember it.

I'm all for file sharing. That's great - as long as people are prepared for the significant consequences. One is that music will become completely couched in advertising. That's already happened. And another is that people should be prepared to have fun with the past because the only music that can possibly be free is the music that's from the past. It costs money to make music. And if people are prepared to only have the past to listen to, then let it be free.

History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.

I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.

The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.

As far as me, I'm just looking forward to the future. There's a lot of people that look to the past. I've learned from the past, absolutely. I know my past absolutely. I'm not discrediting or... ignoring my past in any way, but my focus has always been moving forward, moving forward into the future.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

Too many people live too much in the past. The past must be a springboard, not a sofa.

I love my people's history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors' past.

What am I writing for anyway? Is it like dreaming? Is it a benevolent process? Something that moves the past forward? And what about those people who say all you get from looking at the past is a stiff neck?

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

All the events of your past have formed a lens, or paradigm, through which you see the world. And since no one's past is exactly like anyone else's, no two people see alike.

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.

All of us benefit from remembering our past. A people which remembers does not repeat past errors; instead, it looks with confidence to the challenges of the present and the future.

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

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?

I see a lot of actors that are doing things to please their coaches, their teachers in the past. They say 'No' to parts they should have said 'Yes' to simply because of the opinion of people in their past. I have no one in my past who is judging me and saying, 'Maybe you shouldn't do that.' I'll do it all.

People should learn that you cannot dwell in your past. One who dwells in the past hurts not only himself, but also the people around him.

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

I just don't want to live in the past. I'm really disappointed by so many people of my generation who - in order to promote their new work, they have to constantly lean on their past. I don't want to be that type of artist... I see a lot of people out here doing really marginal music.

People say, 'Don't live in the past.' But I guess it depends on how interesting your past is.

You know, some people can't get past their past, I guess. I certainly haven't.

The past is not dead; it is not even past. People live on inner time; the moment in which a decisive thought or feeling takes place can be at any time. Timeless feelings are common to all of us.

An important part of building a new culture was allowing people to complain about their past. At first, the more they complained, the worse the past would seem. But by venting, people could start to resolve the past. By bitching and bitching and bitching, they could exhaust the drama of their own horror stories. Grow bored. Only then could they accept a new story for their lives. Move forward.

Too many people make the past their identity and spend the rest of their lives accumulating sympathy for their past pain.

I'm not an addict and I do not do drugs. I made mistakes in the past and all I can do is apologize, but it is what it is and I can't change the past. And I can apologize to my family and my friends and my colleagues and the people.

They're people who probably imagine that they would have had a better time in the past. I wouldn't imagine you'd encounter a lot of black people saying 'Oh, the '50s, that was when America was great.' It's very dangerous because the past was imperfect, and you can't go back anyway.

People who live in the past generally are afraid to compete in the present. I've got my faults, but living in the past is not one of them. There's no future in it.

It is necessary to heal the wounds of the past If you are going to build your country and to have unity. I am working with people who fought me very bitterly before the elections. It was my responsibility as the man who is leading the majority party, my responsibility to heal the wounds of the past and to work with people who were my opponents.

While I honor the soldiers in my family, and I am a student of history, the past is the past, and I do not live in the past.

Forget about what happened in the past. The past is the past. Who cares? Time heals things.

The past is the past. As long as it's not a mass-murderer past! You're with the person who you're with as they are now.

Everyone's past is locked up in their recipes - the past of an individual and the past of a nation as well.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

People will constantly bring up my past and throw it in my face, but the Creator of the Universe doesn't. If you ask forgiveness from Him, then it's gone forever. The past is never brought up to shame you or degrade you.

Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past." "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.

True forgiveness deals with the past, all of the past, to make the future possible. We cannot go on nursing grudges even vicariously for those who cannot speak for themselves any longer. We have to accept that we do what we do for generations past, present and yet to come. That is what makes a community a community or a people a people-for better or for worse.

A lot of people are really hung on the past - they can't get past that - but you've gotta get past that if you want any future.

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.

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

You do not move ahead by constantly looking in a rear view mirror. The past is a rudder to guide you, not an anchor to drag you. We must learn from the past but not live in the past.

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.

It used to hurt me in the past years to hear people say they want to leave India. But with the experience of past few months, I can say that we have removed that gloom from the minds of the people.

More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time when you are called home for dinner, past the time of doing chores, past the time when your body betrays you past time itself.

By bringing the past into the present, we create a future just like the past. By letting the past go, we make room for miracles.

You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

I think when two people get together, their past is their past. Their reputations are reputations. You can only take someone the way you find them... on face value.

It's too easy, you see, to get trapped in the past. The past is very seductive. People always talk about the mists of time, you know, but really it's the present that's in a mist, uncertain. The past is quite clear, and warm, and comforting. That's why people often get stuck there.

As far as the media's concerned, Mrs. Obama deserves this. Look at the sordid past. Look at our slave past, look at the discriminatory past. It's only fair that people of color get their taste of the wealth of America too.

Some countries and some people are so primitively religious and so underdeveloped that they don't need a time machine to go back to the past; they are already in there, in the very distant and dark past!

People don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.

I'm not someone who lives in the past; I find other people live in my past. I live in the present and the future.