Past Quotes

Study the past if you would define the future.

Nationalism is essentially a group memory of past achievements, traditions, and experiences.

The Ganga to me is the symbol of India's memorable past which has been flowing into the present and continues to flow towards the ocean of the future.

When the present is full of gloom, the past becomes haven of refuge that provides relief and inspiration.

Without that passion and urge, there is a gradual oozing out of hope and vitality, a settling down on lower levels of existence, a slow merging into non-existence. We become prisoners of the past and some part of its immobility sticks to us.

The discovery of India - what have I discovered? It was presumptuous of me to imagine that I could unveil her and find out what she is today and what she was in the long past. Today she is four hundred million separate individual men and women, each differing from the other, each living in a private universe of thought and feeling. If this is so in the present, how much more so to grasp that multitudinous past of innumerable successions of human beings.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

Every past is worth condemning.

Now know I well what people sought formerly above all else when they sought teachers of virtue. Good sleep they sought for themselves, and poppy-head virtues to promote it! To all those be-lauded sages of the academic chairs, wisdom was sleep without dreams: they knew no higher significance of life. Even at present, to be sure, there are some like this preacher of virtue, and not always so honorable: but their time is past. And not much longer do they stand: there they already lie. Blessed are those drowsy ones: for they shall soon nod to sleep.

As soon as it becomes possible, by dint of a strong will, to overthrow the entire past of the world, then, in a single moment, we will join the ranks of independent gods. World history for us will then be nothing but a dreamlike otherworldly being.

The age of Socratic man is past: crown yourselves with ivy, grasp the thyrsus and do not be amazed if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet.

We conserve nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means liberal; we do not work for progress; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about equal rights, a free society, no more masters and no servants has no allure for us.

During the longest period of the human past nothing was more terrible than to feel that one stood by oneself. To be alone, to experience things by oneself, neither to obey nor to rule, to be an individual-that was not a pleasure but a punishment; one was sentenced to individuality.

The past cannot be cured.

A fool too late bewares when all the peril is past.

The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past - no matter how good it was.

I want to lead Canada. All of Canada, not just parts of Canada. ... I am not going to write off certain parts of the country just because we had a tough past 10 years. Or, tough past 100 years.

Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists - they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.

If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God.

The lack of historical memory is a serious shortcoming in our society. A mentality that can only say, "Then was then, now is now", is ultimately immature. Knowing and judging past events is the only way to build a meaningful future. Memory is necessary for growth.