Prisoner Of The Past Quotes

We have to understand that the closer you get to the corridors of power, to the Oval Office and Congress, the more you become a prisoner of the past .The closer you get to the marginalized, the grassroots and the groundlings, the greater your incentive to think imaginatively and 'outside the box. ~ Team Colors Collective

Don't be a prisoner of the past, be a pioneer of the future. ~ Farshad Asl

Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future. ~ Deepak Chopra

Don't be a prisoner of the past, become a pioneer of the future. ~ Farshad Asl

How many nights and sunrises came to caress our hearts. Then, as often happens, I see I'm just lonely in living the poetry of these moments, and I'm throwing away my magic. I can find refuge in my songs, they surround me like a mother, but then I realize that this hug is becoming a cage, I'm prisoner in my dreams, and I wonder: "may I be condemned to dream forever?" ... I wish I could watch again beauty of the moon, creating a big heart made of shells on the beach, as a castaway's signal ... hoping to be seen by someone who's flying up there ... and loudly saying .. "Hey .. I'm here ! please help me to escape ~ Alice James Books

The moral of the story is that seeking truth, rather than fear of pain or the desire for happiness, is the correct orientation toward inner work, since seeking happiness makes you its prisoner just as surely as does pain. ~ Sandra Maitri

They soon lost interest in Sofya. She was just one more prisoner -with no more idea of her destination than anyone else. No one asked her name and patronymic; no one remembered her surname. She realized with surprise that although the process of evolution had taken millions of years, these people had needed only a few days to revert to the state of cattle, dirty and unhappy, captive and nameless. ~ Vasily Grossman

The past is a kind of future that has already happened. ~ Bruce Sterling

Who are you, man?"
"I? I am nothing," replied the other. "A leaf caught in a whirlpool. A feather in the wind..."
"Too bad," said Yama, "for there are leaves and feathers enough in the world for me to have labored so long only to increase their number. I wanted me a man, one who might continue a war interrupted by his absence-a man of power who could oppose with that power the will of gods. I thought you were he."
"I am"-he sqinted again-"Sam. I am Sam. Once- long ago... I did fight, didn't I? Many times..."
"You were the Great-Souled Sam, the Budda. Do you remember?"
"Maybe I was.." a slow fire was kindled in his eyes.
"Yes," he said then. "Yes, I was. Humblest of the proud, proudest of the humble. I fought. I taught the Way for a time. I fought again, taught again, tried politics, magic, poison.. I fought one great battle so terrible the sun itself hid its face from the slaughter-with men and gods, with animals and demons, with spirits of the earth and air, of fire and water, with slizzards and horses, swords and chariots-"
"And you lost," said Yama.
"Yes, I did, didn't I? But it was quite a showing we gave them, wasn't it? You, deathgod, were my charioteer. It all comes back to me now. We were taken prisoner and the Lords of Karma were to be our judges. You escaped them by the will-death and the Way of the Black Wheel. I could not. ~ Roger Zelazny

God can only be of service to me and I to him, not in the past, nor in the future, but only right now in this moment. ~ Steven James

He could swear he did not look back, could not - by any optical chance, or in any prism - have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture - which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never - consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It would be a ridiculous and unwarranted presumption on our part if we imagined that we were more energetic or more intelligent than the men of the past - our material knowledge has increased, but not our intelligence. ~ C. G. Jung

The White House is defending President Obama's sports activities over the past week, saying that everyone needs leisure time. Thanks to these economic policies, 9.5 percent of Americans have all the leisure time they need. ~ Jay Leno

I didn't understand time, either, when I was young. How could I know that after I died, Parchman would pull me from the sky? How could I imagine Parchman would pull me to it and refuse to let go? And how could I conceive that Parchman was past, present and future all at once? That the history and sentiment that carved the place out of the wilderness would show me that time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once? ~ Jesmyn Ward

seven tips for gaining the response rate you want with direct mail. 1. The headline of your brochure should ask for the order. 2. The copy should always tell the person what to do next. 3. Blue is a dandy second color, but red with black is generally the best-pulling direct-mail combination. 4. Red can be overused; use it primarily for highlights. 5. Experts say that the four most important elements in direct mail are the list, the offer, the copy, and the graphics. Guerrillas pay close attention to each. 6. The fastest-growing segment of the direct-mail industry is nontraditional mailers - those who haven't used direct mail in the past. 7. Direct-mail success comes with the cumulative effect of repeat mailings. Make them repetitive yet different from one another. ~ Jay Conrad Levinson

John cursed himself. Or rather, he
cursed the past version of himself for so
thoughtlessly screwing over the current
version of himself. ~ David Wong

To put it slightly differently, small sovereign nations, like Iceland, have choices to make within the broader constraints created for them by nature and by the rest of humanity. However limited these choices might be, Iceland's body politic retains absolute authority to hold their elected officials accountable for the decisions they have reached within the nation's exogenous constraints, and to strike down every piece of legislation that it has decided upon in the past. (...) In this sense, small, powerless Iceland continues to enjoy full sovereignty while the comparatively omnipotent European Union has been stripped of all forms of sovereignty. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

In our civilized societies we are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why this painful drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best paid workman, this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from the past, and in spite of the powerful means of production, which could ensure comfort to all, in return for a few hours of daily toil? ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

I'd like to teach kids how to write songs. This will be my first year so I'm just as green as some of the rest of the folks. It's like a music camp and I get to hang out with some of the past contestants. ~ Bo Bice

Freedom can never be taken for granted. Each generation must safeguard it and extend it. Your parents and elders sacrificed much so that you should have freedom without suffering what they did. Use this precious right to ensure that the darkness of the past never return. ~ Nelson Mandela

Chapter One: The Dawn and the Dread

Heartbeat, heartbeat comes from Valhallan way,
To meet down in judgment, to ply its trade.
Two →swords← to join in worthy cross,
Actions to be rendered, one to be lost.

She did come now from 'yond northern slope,
A day of reckoning did she again once hope.
A devout meeting was her qwesterly bane,
To stay her hand was to go insane.

St. Kari of the Blade to meet her past,
A wicked enemy, peerless of match.
Rode Kari she her charger on down,
Past the Dead Land where Gaul sat crowned.

A killing job, yea, she desired to lastly kill,
To set things right so her heart might lie still.
Upon the mist and roaring plain,
She entered in, a soul uncontained.

A fierce wind in deed, and forever freed,
Enemies she annihilhates ('tis hur' creed).
Her own advanced guard of a sort,
Multitudes to follow in her report.

Know this Valkyrie from on cold,
An ancient maiden soft and bold.
A warrior spirit from Ages past,
A fragmented mind like broken glass.

Solid in stature this eternal framed being,
Yet crippled within from internaled bleedings.
A sword saint so refined in the poetic art,
A noble character yet with a banshee's heart.

Rhythmed horse now to the beats,
Kari emboldened amid the sleet.
Beyond the mountain she does come,
Unto southern fields wherein r ~ Douglas Laurent

It's almost as if Kennedy grabbed a decade out of the 21st century," Cernan said, "and spliced it into the 1960s." That helps to explain why, as I wrote in 1993 in the preface of this book, we weren't entirely ready for Apollo, and why we have struggled to absorb its impact ever since it happened. How could the most futuristic thing humans have ever done be so far in the past? ~ Andrew Chaikin

One faith, St. Paul writes (Eph. 4:5). Hold most firmly that our faith is identical with that of the ancients. Deny this, and you dissolve the unity of the Church ... We must hold this for certain, namely: that the faith of the people at the present day is one with the faith of the people in past centuries. Were this not true, then we would be in a different church than they were in and, literally, the Church would not be One. ~ Thomas Aquinas

A.N. Kolmogorov and Yasha Sinai had worked out some illuminating mathematics for the way a system's "entropy per unite time" applies to the geometric pictures of surfaces stretching and folding in phase space. The conceptual core of the technique was a matter of drawing some arbitrarily small box around some set of initial conditions, as one might draw a small square on the side of a balloon, then calculating the effect of various expressions or twists on the box. It might stretch in one direction, for example, while remaining narrow in the other. The change in area corresponded to an introduction of uncertainty about the system's past, a gain or loss of information. ~ James Gleick

I can't live off of yesterday - that's in the past. ~ Juice Newton

Let go of the past and live the future ... Live the life you imagined. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Hoddan began suddenly to see real possibilities. This was not a direct move toward the realization of his personal ambitions. But on the other hand, it wasn't a movement away from them. Hoddan suddenly remembered an oration he'd heard his grandfather give many, many times in the past.
"Straight thinkin'," the old man had said obstinately, "is a delusion. You think things out clear and simple, and you can see yourself ruined and your family starving any day! But real things ain't simple! They ain't clear! Any time you try to figure things out so they're simple and straightforward, you're goin' against nature and you're going to get 'em mixed up! So when something happens and you're in a straightforward, hopeless fix - why, you go along with nature! Make it as complicated as you can, and the people who want you in trouble will get hopeless confused and you can get out! ~ Murray Leinster

Until one looks back on one's own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has. ~ Agatha Christie

Part of the job of adults was to set limits. But the last rule, the unspoken rule of any story or journey, is that all limits are suspect. All warnings show only the point where the last story stopped, the boundary past which the map is unmapped. The Kingdom of Here There Be Dragons is the province of explorers, magicians, and kids. ~ Bob Proehl

While we sometimes feel and have felt in days that are past and gone, to complain because we meet with oppression, persecution, and affliction, yet I wish to say to my brethren and sisters that these things are the heritage of the Saints of God. ... I have never read of the people of God in any dispensation passing through life, as the sectarian world would say, on flowery beds of ease, without opposition of any kind. ~ Wilford Woodruff

Those unexpected morality lessons provided by the trip had jolted me into some kind of action. It was time to jettison the past before the present jettisoned me. This was my first veiled attempt at recovery. Although perhaps I was just running away again. I returned to Glasgow, planning to say a final goodbye to Anne and get out of her life, but ended up drinking with buddies in the Chip Bar and never seeing her. I called her instead to say I was moving to London and told her she could have the house and everything else we owned, which wasn't much. I think she was as relieved as I was that I was leaving town for good. ~ Craig Ferguson

Melancholy is a kind of boredom refined, the feeling that one does not belong to this world. It's a sensation of irremediable exile, without immediate cause. Melancholy is a feeling deeply autonomous, also independent of the failure of those great personal successes. Nostalgia, on the contrary, still clings to something, even if it is only to the past. ~ Emil M. Cioran

The truth is that there's no such thing as a personal problem. If you've got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future. Likely people you know too. That doesn't minimize the problem or mean that it shouldn't hurt. It doesn't mean you aren't legitimately a victim in some circumstances ~ Mark Manson

but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination - "unstuckness," in other words - are completely outside its domain. We ~ Robert M. Pirsig

After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes? ~ Umberto Eco

I'm not the only person who carries a lot of assumptions when I read the Bible, and it can be tough to entertain the idea that the Word of God has different perspectives in it. Biblical apologists spend all their time weaving these different viewpoints into a single frame, in an effort that often looks like squids playing Twister: fascinating, appalling, and hard to follow. We've seen what this approach to history can sow: a destructive oversimplification of the Church's past.
Americans treat their national narrative in much this way, too. We simplistically teach a single story in our history classrooms, of brave rebels who left cultures of tyranny and heroically crossed the Atlantic to found a nation built on freedom and justice. When we speak of our national sins, such as the genocide committed on Nation Americans or the brutal, longterm economic extraction of wealth from black bodies via slavery and segregation, we seem to dismiss these troubling matters as things that happened in the remote past but that have been resolved today. ~ Mike McHargue

Over the past few days I have been fighting off a virus that has affected the majority of my band and crew. ~ Mika.

Pyschoanalysts are fond of pointing out that the past is alive in the present. But the future is alive in the present too. The future is not some place we're going to, but an idea in our mind now. It is something we're creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present. ~ Stephen Grosz

The cab took them past other libraries and townhouses, then the redbrick walls of Keble College with their zigzag patterns, which looked ridiculous and spoke, Grace suspected, of the general unavailability of proper Cotswolds sandstone. ~ Natasha Pulley

Digital transformation represents a break with the past, having a high level of impact and complexity. ~ Pearl Zhu

Because it is possible to create - creating one's self, willing to be one's self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) - one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one's possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one's possibilities brings guilt toward one's self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one's environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one's environment or established patterns within one's self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creati ~ Rollo May

Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. ~ Michael Scanlon

Choicelessness is the alchemy of transformation, of inner mutation. A new being is born who has nothing to do with the past, who is absolutely discontinuous with the past. He has no desire. And when there is no desire, for the first time you live ~ Rajneesh