Thinking Of The Past Quotes

Moving forward in science is as much unwinding the distorted thinking of the past as it is putting a clearer idea on the table. ~ Craig Venter

You are thinking of the past." I put my arms around her. She'd risen from childbed too soon. "We are the past," she said. ~ Sandra Gulland

I dreamed of myself in a dream, and told the dream, which was mine, as if it were another person's of whom I dreamed. Indeed what is life when thinking of the past, but dreaming of a dream dreamt by another who seems to be oneself? ~ Stopford Brooke

Keep off your thoughts from things that are past and done; for thinking of the past wakes regret and pain. ~ Arthur Waley

I have never had time for the idea of searching. Whenever I wanted to express something, I did so without thinking of the past or the future. ~ Pablo Picasso

Still, looking through the old volumes was soothing, because thinking of the past made the present seem a little less real. ~ Dodie Smith

Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

At my age, one should be aware of one's limits, and this knowledge may make for happiness. When I was young, I thought of literature as a game of skillful and surprising variations; now that I have found my own voice, I feel that tinkering and tampering neither greatly improve nor greatly spoil my drafts. This, of course, is a sin against one of the main tendencies of letters in this century--the vanity of overwriting-- ... I suppose my best work is over. This gives me a certain quiet satisfaction and ease. And yet I do not feel I have written myself out. In a way, youthfulness seems closer to me today than when I was a young man. I no longer regard happiness as unattainable; once, long ago, I did. Now I know that it may occur at any moment but that it should never be sought after. As to failure or fame, they are quite irrelevant and I never bother about them. What I'm out for now is peace, the enjoyment of thinking and of friendship, and, though it may be too ambitious, a sense of loving and of being loved. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

If you were to take the lessons and experiences you've acquired in the past one year, five years or 10 years and skillfully invest that into your future, how powerful would that be? Where would you find yourself at the end of the next year? ~ Jim Rohn

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) ~ Norman Doidge

Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. ~ C.S. Lewis

Even in drama, I like to try to find the humor because I think it's very human. Even in the depths of dreadful situations, there's usually something rather comic, or something you can laugh about afterwards, at least. ~ Colm Meaney

The truths Phaedrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye. In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can't make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That's a word he later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn't move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull's-eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window. Lateral knowledge is knowledge that's from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that's not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one's existing system of getting at truth. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

The best night of my life was watching the Japanese Noh theater. I've only seen it once, but even saying it now, I think, 'How can I ever have this experience again?' It was so mesmerizing, so complicated and so primordial; I could not believe it. ~ Vivienne Westwood

Common sense is not really so common.
The Art of Thinking: Port-Royal Logic ~ Antoine Arnauld

The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of value. One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets-anything that might throw light upon the past had been systemically altered. ~ George Orwell

We think that maybe feminism isn't appropriate anymore, since Western women have really made enormous strides. But check out the rest of the world if you'd like to not be able to sleep tonight. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

The Bombyx mori caterpillar," her brother supplied, thinking of snack time at the Shaolin Temple. "It tastes like chicken. ~ Gordon Korman

Any vigorous competition will entail at least two elements: offense and defense. Offense is the effort you put into scoring against your opponents, and defense is the effort you apply to stop them from scoring against you. Those who suggest that "a little healthy competition can't hurt" are thinking only of the offense part....

The offense component of internal competition is problematic, but the defense component is always injurious. When peer managers play defense against each other (try to stop each other from scoring), they are engaging in anticooperation. ~ Tom DeMarco

In place of hope all that remained to him was endurance, and somewhere beyond the long sequence of nights, beyond the orchards that faded, blossomed, and perished once more, beyond all the people he had encountered and who had then passed on into the past, there existed his fated day-when he would have to take to his bed, turn his face to the wall, and pass away without being able to cry ~ Andrei Platonov

Papa-Lo start thinking too deep and start thinking that he should be more than what he is. He's the worst kind of fool, the fool who start believing things can get better. ~ Marlon James

I fully realize that every promise I make, the Republicans will double and the Democrats will redouble. They think this will make me vulnerable, but they don't know I have some tricks up my sleeve, along with a box of raisins to munch on while I'm waiting for the returns to come in. ~ Gracie Allen

What's crucial is that the IRA produce a credible statement that paramilitary and criminality activity is a thing of the past. That they are committed to a future which is exclusively peaceful and democratic. ~ Peter Hain

I think the Internet really sussed things into perspective. Because twelve years ago, I could spend my days on writing and running my band and touring and making posters and practicing with my band and working on my vocals, but I didn't spend a large pie chart of my time sifting through criticism as well, and nowadays I do, and all female artists do, because to be able to promote your work, you need to live in those spaces. ~ Amanda Palmer

I never got really into Twitter until more recently when I started doing the Dirt Nasty thing, and created that other character. I think it's almost essential now. I don't think Leonardo DiCaprio necessarily needs to do it, but someone like me, who's somewhere in the middle of nowhere and a shitstack, I need to do that. ~ Simon Rex

The clock struck half past two. In the little office at the back of Mr. McKechnie's bookshop, Gordon
Gordon Comstock, last member of the Comstock family, aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already
lounged across the table, pushing a fourpenny packet of Player's Weights open and shut with his thumb. ~ George Orwell

I don't live in the past. I just live in the enjoyment of the game. ~ Joe Montana

Radical Forgiveness is much more than the mere letting go of the past. It is the key to creating the life that we want, and the world that we want. It is the key to our own happiness and the key to world peace. It is no longer an option. It is our destiny. ~ Colin Tipping

I always knew I wanted to do a Western. And trying to think of what that would be, I always figured that if I did a Western, it would have a lot of the aesthetics of Spaghetti Westerns, because I really like them. ~ Quentin Tarantino

I went on steadily trying to 'find out how to'; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote "Ethan Frome" that I suddenly felt the artisan's full control of his implements. When "Ethan Frome" first appeared I was severely criticized by the reviewers for what was considered the clumsy structure of the tale. I had pondered long on this structure, had felt its peculiar difficulties, and possible awkwardness, but could think of no alternative which would serve as well in the given case: and though I am far from thinking "Ethan Frome" my best novel, and am bored and even exasperated when I am told that it is, I am still sure that its structure is not its weak point. ~ Edith Wharton

I see no comfort in outliving one's friends, and remaining a mere monument of the times which are past. ~ Thomas Jefferson

My father was a psycho-analyst and I think that fact was very influential on my development as an artist. Trying to search beneath the surface of things for an unexpected sense of mystery. ~ Gregory Crewdson

At Netflix, we think you have to build a sense of responsibility where people care about the enterprise. Hard work, like long hours at the office, doesn't matter as much to us. We care about great work. ~ Reed Hastings

It may be unpopular and out-of-date to say-but I do not think that a scientific result which gives us a better understanding of the world and makes it more harmonious in our eyes should be held in lower esteem than, say, an invention which reduces the cost of paving roads, or improves household plumbing. ~ Alfred Tarski

One of the curious effects of a bad hangover is that you think you're wrong whether you are or not. Not wrong in particulars, but wrong in general, wrong about everything. ~ Jim Harrison

In Indian social-cultural-political discourse there is a general tendency to ignore deeper, intellectual thought, and the sensationalist mass media has actually contributed to a great dumbing down of even the educated masses. In this climate where any and all intellectuality has been mostly confined to a few ivory towers of academy, it is difficult to get even the educated and socio-economically privileged section of the society interested in the idea of exploring any deeper intellectual thought. It seems as if the trinity of pop-sociology, pop-psychology and pop-culture has taken over the general mentality of the society leaving little room for any serious, intellectually rigorous discourse on social-cultural phenomena. If at all, there is any serious attempt to think through and understand the observed phenomena, it is almost always done using the intellectual theories and frameworks developed in the Western academic circles. But this habit of non-thinking or thinking only in terms of borrowed categories must change if we want India to awaken to her innate intellectual potential. ~ Beloo Mehra

An aged painter cannot help but accept the fact that his work belongs in the past. Younger painters have leaped into the phenomenon called contemporary, where it would be foolish of me to try to enter. But I can claim my own phenomenon ... ~ Joseph Plaskett

Death finally comes, usually in the evening, when something in the raconteur fades out for good and in the midst of his story his eyes fix on the horizon and he trails off into silence, thinking of nothing. For this reason the Phaeacians consider silence an act of kindness, as sacred as guest friendship, a grant of repose to a distant stranger. ~ Zachary Mason

All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The only time I really become discouraged is when I think of all the things I would like to do and the little time I have in which to do them. ~ Thomas A. Edison

If I had taken time to think, it would have gotten away again, but conscious thinking had been canceled by pain, surprise, and the horror I suppose almost any man feels when he sees blood pouring from a part of his body that was whole only seconds before. ~ Stephen King

I think the radio is kind of cool, because you're really free to do whatever you want, because you can go into another world. Whereas in TV, you have to make that world. ~ Bret McKenzie

I'd forgotten what an honest sandwich it is. For those of you not familiar, 'BLT' stands for 'bacon, lettuce, and tomato.' A lot of people think the 'B' stands for 'bread,' and I can understand someone not wanting a lettuce and tomato sandwich. But, the bread is implied in the word 'sandwich.' Anyway, it's an American original. Everyone should have a BLT as soon as they can. ~ Stephen Colbert

Most people who open restaurants will fail, because they lack the fundamental understanding of restaurant math. Either they think they're superstar cooks or they think they're superstar hosts. ~ Joe Bastianich

Pursuing a family history beyond a simple catalogue of names is always evidence of separation, of severing ties at least to the extent of holding one's relations at arm's length. The family member who want to make a private gift of a family tree to a close circle of relatives soon becomes the historian who estranges her antecedents by locating them "in history". I found that family history, which humanizes those who might otherwise be mere faces in a crowd, also defamiliarized those closest to me, giving their lives a larger pattern than they had when they were lived. They became both more and less themselves. I consoled myself by thinking that this is what history does to us too. As we grow older we see not how unique our lives have been, but how representative we were and are; that we are part of the figure in the carpet woven by events, by chance and accident, and by the play of forces more powerful than us. ~ Alison Light