- Nov 07, 2020
Past Quotes
Looking back to understand what comes next.
This collection of past quotes includes a mid-20th-century physicist's assessment of the atomic-age power balance between Europe and the Anglo-Saxon powers, alongside a separate scientific note on how measurement affects what can be known about earlier moments. Both sit alongside a simpler idea: building your future apart from your past. Related themes appear in our Truth quotes.
- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
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- Nov 07, 2020
As you get older, you treasure the beautiful things of the past but also see things more clearly.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
I discovered that Thailand was one of those countries, like Sri Lanka and India, where memory of past lives used to be commonplace. Go back a few generations, and you find people talking about earlier lives with total certainty.
- Future
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- Nov 07, 2020
I am only doing now what I have ever done; and ever will continue to do - that is adapting past experience to present reform in the light of high ideals and future objects.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
By this time it was past six, and the enemy's van and ours were at too great a distance to engage, I perceived some of their ships stretching to the northward; and I imagined they were going to form a new line.
- Man
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- Nov 07, 2020
I would rather be an independent senator, governed by my own views, going for the good of the country, uncontrolled by any thing which mortal man can bring to bear upon me, than to be president of the United States, put there as presidents of the United States have been for many years past.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
Unless you're very boring, I think most people who've lived long enough have something in their past which will never go away.
- Look
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- Nov 07, 2020
Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.
- Poetry
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- Nov 07, 2020
In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.
- Time
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- Nov 07, 2020
Give the composer time to experiment, time to try out ideas. Also, the time to fail. When the composer has very little time, the temptation is to reach for stock ideas - ideas they know will work and have worked in the past.
- Interpretation
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- Nov 07, 2020
History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.
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- Nov 07, 2020
Paleoclimatic records show clearly that the past 10,000 years, the Holocene, is a remarkably stable period in which we went from being a few hunters and gatherers to become more sedentary agriculture-based civilizations, which then moved us to the current populated modern era.
- World
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- Nov 07, 2020