Excavating The Past Quotes

For some, excavating the past isn't an adventure, it's more akin to tearing a Band-Aid off an open wound. ~ Raquel Cepeda

Learn from the past, but don't live in the past. ~ Steve Maraboli

All the past is not worth one today. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The past is only a memory. Memories have no power to hurt you. ~ Jordan Castillo Price

We do not ignore maturity. Maturity consists in not losing the past while fully living in the present with a prudent awareness of the possibilities of the future. ~ Thomas Traherne

But this is where we're different. You can see the future and refuse to change it. Where I come from, we can see the past, but we keep repeating it. That's why we're different. The same but different. ~ Hugh Howey

If we studied the issue of forgiveness with a wider perspective, we are bound to opt for it after all. ~ Stephen Richards

Some people say, "Oh! You have to meditate!" You have to sit in the lotus position! Blah blah blah. No, you don't. All you have to do is stay in the present. When you catch yourself upset about the past or worried about the future, say to yourself, "Ah, I'm time traveling," then STOP. ~ James Altucher

I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It's hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside you like a stone. ~ Lauren Oliver

Mantras are the past & the future. ~ David R. Wommack

Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past. To come into the present is to stop the war. ~ Jack Kornfield

You get to know what you should have done better regretfully when you watch others take the stage enthusiastically to do what you should have done better ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again. ~ Marcel Proust

The past is gone, and tomorrow is an illusion. There is only now. ~ William Donelson

Among the current discussions, the impact of new and sophisticated methods in the study of the past occupies an important place. The new 'scientific' or 'cliometric' history-born of the marriage contracted between historical problems and advanced statistical analysis, with economic theory as bridesmaid and the computer as best man-has made tremendous advances in the last generation. ~ Robert Fogel

The snow filled the air with a soft grey-blue mist, softening the wind and gunfire, bringing the earth and sky together into one swaying blur.
The snow fell on Bach's shoulders; it was as though flakes of silence were falling on the still Volga, on the dead city, on the skeletons of horses. It was snowing everywhere, on earth and on the stars; the whole universe was full of snow. Everything was disappearing beneath it: guns, the bodies of the dead, filthy dressings, rubble, scraps of twisted iron.
This soft, white snow settling over the carnage of the city was time itself; the present was turning into the past, and there was no future. ~ Vasily Grossman

My parents ... were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing. ~ Richard Ford

Non est ad astra mollis e terris via.
That's my philosophy. Its a quote from the past. There is no easy way from the earth to the stars. ~ Cecil Castellucci

When I had money in the past, I would always travel rather than spend it on big apartments or cars. And I still feel exactly the same way. ~ Robin Wright

We own the economy. We own the beginning of the turnaround and we want to make sure that we continue that pace of recovery, not go back to the policies of the past under the Bush administration that put us in the ditch in the first place. ~ Debbie Wasserman Schultz

History is not just a tale of men's making, but is a thing tied to the land. We call a hill by the name of a hero who died there, or name a river after a princess who fled beside its banks, and when the old names vanish, the stories go with them and the new names carry no reminder of the past. ~ Bernard Cornwell

The past isn't useful until its place in the present is found. ~ Judith Perelman Rossner

I am inspired by the women I meet everywhere I go. They have to work so hard just to make sure their families survive, but somehow they stay optimistic and do everything in their power to make the future better than the past. ~ Melinda Gates

I don't think I've ever gotten any significant thing I wanted. You have no idea how weird it is to envision things and have them come to nothing. No vision has ever come true, no promise has ever been kept. But then there was you, and you were the promise that would obliterate all the disappointments of the past. Everything about you insisted on it. Your color, your hair, the way light projects from every part of you. You were the sun that would burn away all the putrid broken promises of the world. ~ Dave Eggers

Photography is an art of teleporting the past into the future. ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

And I recognized then the process by which I had always attempted difficult things. I had simply not allowed myself to think of the consequences, but had closed my eyes, jumped in, and before I knew where I was, it was impossible to renege. I was basically a dreadful coward, I knew that about myself. The only way I could overcome this was to trick myself with that other self, who lived in dream and fantasy and who was annoyingly lackadaisical and unpractical. All passion, no sense, no order, no instinct for self-preservation. That's what I had done, and now that cowardly self had discovered an unburnt bridge by which to return to the past. As Renata Adler writes in Speedboat: I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort. ~ Robyn Davidson

With a few exceptions, the media have phrased the past five months as a contest of wills between Bush and Saddam Hussein, not as a moment of deragement between two armed madmen willing to order their young to slaughter each other. Analysis -endless analysis- has been offered about the two men's tactics, as if they were coaches preparing for the Super Bowl. ~ Colman McCarthy

The future bears a resemblance to the past, only more so. ~ Faith Popcorn

The present is our own. The right-this-second, the here-and-now, this moment before the next, is ours for the taking. It's the only free gift the universe has to offer. The past doesn't belong to us anymore, and the future is just a fantasy, never guaranteed. But the present is ours to own. The only way we can realize that fantasy is if we embrace the now. ~ Renee Carlino

My god, I hope you find love. And I don't just mean that in regards to someone you wrap your tired bones around at night. I mean that I hope you find love in every aspect of your life. I hope you find it tucked into early morning sunrises and the smell of your favorite places. I hope you find it strung between the laughter you share with friends I hope it bounces off of you when you hug the people you care for I hope it swells within your rib cage whenever you hear your favorite song or discover something that moves you. I hope you fall in love with growth, and change, and the messiness, and the beauty of fucking up, and making mistakes, and becoming exactly who you want to be. I hope you find love in places that were once devoid of it, in places within yourself that you could have been softer to, kinder to, in the past. Because if there is one thing I have learned, it is that love is so much more than a boy or a girl who holds your heart. Love is everything around you. It is everything. ~ Bianca Sparacino