Bygone Is Bygone Quotes & Sayings

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. — Bertrand Russell

Look at their arts, their power of turning stone into lifelike figures, and above all, the way in which they can transfer their thoughts to white leaves, so that others, many many years hence, can read them and know all that was passing, and what men thought and did in the long bygone. Truly it is marvelous. — G.A. Henty

Frankly, out in America, you get the feeling that America is dying. And along its highways and byways, the country seems less ready to leap into the future than it is already clinging to a sepia-toned past when America stood as the unencumbered Big Boy in a Manichean world of good and evil, capitalists and Commies. Even the neon oasis-pods of the interstate - the perpetual clusters of Wendy's, McDonald's, Denny's, and Burger King - are crowded with people strangely reclaiming bygone days, connecting themselves to some prior eating experience, reveling in the familiar. We gas — Michael Paterniti

The only life I have left to live is future life. The past is not in my hands to offer or alter. It is gone. Not even God will change the past. All the expectations of God are future expectations. All the possibilities of faith and love are future possibilities. And all the power that touches me with help to live in love is future power. As precious as the bygone blessings of God may be, if He leaves me only with the memory of those, and not with the promise of more, I will be undone. My hope for future goodness and future glory is future grace. — John Piper

Without conjuring up fantasies of bygone eras with family games and long, leisurely meals, the question arises: isn't there a better family life available than this dismal, mechanized arrangement of children watching television for however long is allowed them, evening after evening? — Marie Winn

There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it. — Elias Canetti

A person experiences time by traveling through the environment consisting of time and space, and encounters a variety of sense impressions. Time is the combined experience and cataloguing what is taking place now, a recollecting what took place before now, and the anticipation or expectation of a person registering future physical and mental sensations. Time is a happening that will arrive from the future and it will last for about as long as it takes to a person to inhale and exhale one deep bodily breath. In each recognizable segment of time, a person experiences in a thematic breathing cycle a tangible sense perception of either seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, or some combination thereof. Then that distinct morsel of life detected by the physical senses passes from the slipstream of now and lodges into the silted fold of bygone memories. — Kilroy J. Oldster

History is the mighty tower of experience, which time has built amidst the endless fields of bygone ages. - Forward — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

A certain bygone philosophy-which certainly must have quite forgotten all about the real child-used to speak of the child's nature as a tabula rasa, or 'blank page,' upon which experience and training might write what they pleased. As a matter of fact, the child's nature at birth, like that of a calf or a chick, is pretty well scribbled over by the experience of its ancestors. It is far from being blank, for as soon as the little organism comes into the world, it begins to do certain things and do them with much zeal and determination, as every one knows who knows real children. — Edward O. Sisson

The supply of matter in the universe was never more tightly packed than it is now, or more widely spread out. For nothing is ever added to it or subtracted from it. It follows that the movement of atoms today is no different from what it was in bygone ages and always will be. So the things that have regularly come into being will continue to come into being in the same manner; they will be and grow and flourish so far as each is allowed by the laws of nature. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Nothing is more irreligious than to persecute the seekers of truth in order to keep up absurdities and superstitions of bygone ages. Nothing is more inhuman than the commission of 'devout cruelty' under the mask of love of God and man. — Kaiten Nukariya

You have come from the Citadel - I know, you see, something of your journeyings and history - that great fortress of bygone days, so you must possess some feeling for the past. Has it never struck you that mankind was richer by far, and happier too, a chiliad gone than it is now?" "Everyone knows," I said, "that we have fallen far from the brave days of the past." "As it was then, so shall it be again. Men of Urth, sailing between the stars, leaping from galaxy to galaxy, the masters of the daughters of the sun. — Gene Wolfe

A farm regulated to production of raw commodities is not a farm at all. It is a temporary blip until the land is used up, the water polluted, the neighbors nauseated, and the air unbreathable. The farmhouse, the concrete, the machinery, and outbuildings become relics of a bygone vibrancy when another family farm moves to the city financial centers for relief. — Joel Salatin

A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys. — Michael Joseph Oakeshott

In this culture of participation awards, this society where everyone is special and legitimate skill is the mark of a bygone era, we have ceased to quantify accomplishment. I look around and see a generation of useless, over privileged men who have all been taught to express their opinions rather than get things done. — J.A. Rock

Now that they've finished reading the Constitution out loud, the Teabaggers must call out that group of elitist liberals whose values are so antithetical to theirs. I'm talking of course about the Founding Fathers, who the Teabaggers believe are just like them, but aren't. One is a group of exclusively white men who live in a bygone century, have bad teeth, and think of blacks as 3/5 of a person, and the other are the Founding Fathers. — Bill Maher

When everything is dark, when we are surrounded by despairing voices, when we do not see any exits, then we can find salvation in a remembered love, a love which is not simply a recollection of a bygone past but a living force which sustains us in the present. Through memory, love transcends the limits of time and offers hope at any moment of our lives. — Henri Nouwen

Love is an utterly bygone, sorry, worn-out, miserable thing with me- for him or anyone else. — Thomas Hardy

Related to this first reason is the fear that a passion for holiness makes you some kind of weird holdover from a bygone era. As soon as you share your concern about swearing or about avoiding certain movies or about modesty or sexual purity or self-control or just plain godliness, people look at you like you have a moralistic dab of cream cheese on your face from the 1950s. Believers get nervous that their friends will call them legalistic, prudish, narrow-minded, old fashioned, holier-than-thou - or worst of all, a fundamentalist. — Kevin DeYoung

The subjects of them did not look tragic. They looked, actually, rather ridiculous, since nearly all of them were dressed in the style of a bygone day, and nothing is more ridiculous than the fashions of yesterday - though in another thirty years or so their charm may have reappeared, or at any rate be once more apparent. — Agatha Christie

Alas! Your dear friend and servant Galileo has been for the last month hopelessly blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which I by my marvelous discoveries and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into such a small space as is filled by my own bodily sensations. — Galileo Galilei

When the rose's flash to the sunset
Reels to the wrack and the twist,
And the rose is a red bygone,
When the face I love is going
And the gate to the end shall clang,
And it's no use to beckon or say, "So long"
Maybe I'll tell you then
some other time. — Carl Sandburg

It is strange how interiors reflect their dark turbulent past, how in their stillness bygone history tries to be reenacted, how the same situations repeat themselves with infinite variations, turned upside down and inside out by fruitless dialectic of wallpapers and hangings. — Bruno Schulz

It is easy to say we believe in God as long as we remain in the little world we choose to live in; but get out into the great world of facts, the noisy world where people are absolutely indifferent to you, where your message is nothing more than a crazy tale belonging to a bygone age, can you believe God there? — Oswald Chambers

At one point in the story, following a brazen daytime bank robbery, Electro is shown escaping from the authorities by climbing up the side of a building, as easily as Spider-Man . . . we see one observer exclaim, "Look!! That strangely-garbed man is racing up the side of the building!" A second man on the street picks up the narrative: "He's holding on to the iron beams in the building by means of electric rays - using them like a magnet!! Incredible!"

There are three feelings inspired by this scene. The first is wonder as to why people rarely use the phrase "strangely-garbed" anymore. The second is nostalgia for the bygone era when pedestrians would routinely narrate events occurring in front of them, providing exposition for any casual bystander. And the third is pleasure at the realization that Electro's climbing this building is actually a physically plausible use of his powers. — James Kakalios

Art schools are partly the villain here. (Never mind that I teach in them.) This generation of artists is the first to have been so widely credentialed, and its young members so fetishize the work beloved by their teachers that their work ceases to talk about anything else. Instead of enlarging our view of being human, it contains safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas. This is a melancholy romance with artistic ruins, homesickness for a bygone era. This yearning may be earnest, but it stunts their work, and by turn the broader culture. — Jerry Saltz

Traders today complain of living in fear that chats from a bygone era will be dredged up and used against them. They paint a picture of a world where communications are monitored, compliance officers roam the trading floors and it's hard to make an honest living. Banks have finally got the picture, they claim. Market manipulation on the scale we've seen over the past few years is no longer possible. Time will tell (p. 174). — Gavin Finch

In a bygone era, penalty-takers would put their laces through the ball and threaten to put a permanent bulge in the netting. For reasons that remain a mystery, the modern preference is for side-footed placement and so the dilemma of goalkeepers has changed from whether to take a guess at dive right or left to if they should dive at all. Or at least that ought to have been their reappraisal. Almunia was feted as the hero in Rome but had he and Doni stayed in the centre of their goal then the number of saves they made in the shoot-out would have been doubled. — Pete Gill

The traditions of ... bygone times, even to the smallest social particular, enable one to understand more clearly the circumstances with contributed to the formation of character. The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes - when an inward necessity for independent individual action arises, which is superior to all outward conventionalities. Therefore it is well to know what were the chains of daily domestic habit which were the natural leading-strings of our forefathers before they learnt to go alone. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible. — Elena Ferrante

Adolescence is like a heavy rain. Even though you catch a cold from it, you still look forward to experiencing it once again.
(From 'In Those Bygone Years, The Girl We All Went After' the novel) — Giddens Ko

Have you any old grudges you would like to pay,
Any wrongs laid up from a bygone day?
-Gather them now and lay them away
When Christmas comes.
Hard thoughts are heavy to carry, my friend,
And life is short from beginning to end;
Be kind to yourself, leave nothing to mend
When Christmas comes. — William Haines Lytle

It has been said that the historian is the avenger, and that standing as a judge between the parties and rivalries and causes of bygone generations he can lift up the fallen and beat down the proud, and by his exposures and his verdicts, his satire and his moral indignation, can punish unrighteousness, avenge the injured or reward the innocent. — Herbert Butterfield

He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone(117). — J.M. Coetzee

Voila! In view humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the "vox populi" now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin, van guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.
Verily this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V. — Alan Moore

Life is not unlike cinema. Each scene has its own music, and the music is created for the scene, woven to it in ways we do not understand. No matter how much we may love the melody of a bygone day or imagine the song of a future one, we must dance within the music of today, or we will always be out of step, stumbling around in something that doesn't suit the moment. — Lisa Wingate

I empathize with those who yearn for a simpler world, for some bygone golden age of domestic and international tranquility. But for the mass of humanity it is an age that never was. — Shirley Hufstedler

Near by is an interesting ruin - the meagre remains of an ancient heathen temple - a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old bygone days when the simple child of Nature, yielding momentarily to sin when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had shown it him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his grandmother as an atoning sacrifice - in those old days when the luckless sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical happiness as long as his relations held out; — Mark Twain

The "civilized" man of today ridicules the idolatry of bygone ages, but he does not realize that he is a far worse idolater than the idolaters of the past. In former times, men set up images of various animals and adored them; today they slaughter those animals and worship their putrefied carcasses. — Arshavir Ter Hovannessian

No doubt your sword is indeed a beautiful thing. It is a tribute to whoever forged it in bygone ages. There are very few such swords as this one left in the world, but remember, it is only a sword, Matthias! It contains no secret spell, nor holds within its blade any magical power. This sword is made for only one purpose, to kill. It will only be as good or evil as the one who wields it. I know that you intend to use it only for the good of your Abbey, Matthias; do so, but never allow yourself to be tempted into using it in a careless or idle way. It would inevitably cost you your life, or that of your dear ones. Martin the Warrior used the sword only for right and good. This is why it has become a symbol of power to Redwall. Knowledge is gained through wisdom, my friend. Use the sword wisely. — Brian Jacques

As Dr. Spock points out, raising happy children is an elusive aim compared to the more concrete aims of parenting in the past: creating competent children in certain kinds of work; and creating morally responsible citizens who fulfill a prescribed set of community obligations. The fact is, those bygone goals are probably more constructive
and achievable. Not all children will grow up to be happy, in spite of their parents' most valiant efforts, and all children are unhappy somewhere along the way. — Jennifer Senior

The past is anything but bygone — Elif Shafak

New York cops are very specific in terms of the way they talk and the way they handle themselves. All these cliches that, as an Englishman, I thought were from a bygone era or were a bit of poetic license with cop shows - the more you hang out with them, the more you realize how real that jargon is. — Theo James

Shall not this bygone Eden that we knew In our Eternal Life have shape and hue? For where Time is not shall not all Time be? In that calm breast whereto our souls are cleaving Shall we not find our loved ones beyond grieving About the hearth-stone of Eternity? — Alphonse De Lamartine

I CANNOT tell you now;
When the wind's drive and whirl
Blow me along no longer,
And the wind's a whisper at last
Maybe I'll tell you then
some other time.
When the rose's flash to the sunset
Reels to the rack and the twist,
And the rose is a red bygone,
When the face I love is going
And the gate to the end shall clang,
And it's no use to beckon or say, "So long"
Maybe I'll tell you then
some other time.
I never knew any more beautiful than you:
I have hunted you under my thoughts,
I have broken down under the wind
And into the roses looking for you.
I shall never find any
greater than you. — Carl Sandburg

For who can wonder that man should feel a vague belief in tales of disembodied spirits wandering through those places which they once dearly affected, when he himself, scarcely less separated from his old world than they, is forever lingering upon past emotions and bygone times, and hovering, the ghost of his former self, about the places and people that warmed his heart of old? — Charles Dickens

Does a mirror preserve everything that has been reflected in it? Is there a record of light, thin membranes compressed layer upon layer that one has to ease apart with the finger-tips so that the colors don't dissipate, so that the moments don't blot and the hours don't run together into inconsequential splotches? So that a song of preserved years lies in your palm, a miniature of your life and times, with every detail meticulous in clear, chanting angel-fine enamel, as on the old manuscripts, at which you can peer through a magnifying glass and marvel at so much effort? So many tears for nothing? For light? For bygone moments? — Marlene Van Niekerk

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. — Saidiya V. Hartman

As for the Republicans
how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage' ... ) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead. — H.P. Lovecraft

Wouldn't it be cool to be single in a bygone area? I take a girl to a drive-in movie, we go have a cheeseburger and a malt at the diner, and then we make out under the stars in my old-timey convertible. Granted, this might have been tough in the fifties given my brown skin tone and racial tensions at the time, but in my fantasy, racial harmony is also part of the deal. — Aziz Ansari

We have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age. — Bertrand Russell

Nostalgia is in my blood. My mother was a passionate teacher of history and a lover of all things "was." I, too, prefer the bygone, and I'm prone to waxing wistful over the end of something even as I'm living it--cherishing, hanging on. — Lisa Anselmo

TODAY
Yesterday was a TODAY; bygone
Everyday is a TODAY; in action...!
Tomorrow is a TODAY; imminent
We cant repossess yesterday
We cant do anything in Tomorrow;
We acquire TODAY as the day of action;
Be somebody, Do something special ;
make every TODAY, a special day...!!! — Prabhu

At nightfall I return home and enter my study. There on the threshold I remove my dirty, mud-spattered clothes, slip on my regal and courtly robes, and thus fittingly attired, I enter the ancient courts of bygone men where, having received a friendly welcome, I feed on the food that is mine alone and that I was born for. I am not ashamed to speak with them and inquire into the reasons for their actions; and they answer me in kindly fashion. And so for four hours I feel no annoyance; I forget all troubles; poverty hold no fears, and death loses its terrors. I become entirely one of them. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Many psychological traditions have noticed that a given behavior pattern was originally a helpful strategy for survival, a strategy that may no longer apply in the present. If you were bullied in the seventh grade, there might be a block in your home-town or city where the bullies used to wait for you, and even as an adult your sense memories might cause you to hesitate before walking confidently down that block. This is definitely true for me, having grown up in New York City. Thus, we have to acknowledge that every habit contains a kind of protective intelligence, a wisdom that somehow got frozen in a bygone time. — Ethan Nichtern

A poem by Margot Bickel

A little peace
within the last hours of the almost bygone day
a little silence
between the days
so that the nascent yesterday does not get in the past
and tomorrow is lived for today — Margot Bickel