Can't Accept The Past Quotes & Sayings

Every human being has both sets of forces within him. One set clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging on to the past, afraid to grow away from the primitive communication with the mother's uterus and breast, afraid to take chances, afraid to jeopardize what he already has, afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels him forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all his capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that he can accept his deepest, real, unconscious Self. — Abraham H. Maslow

Our past is a fictional representation, and the only thing we can be even somewhat sure of is what is happening now. It encourages us to live in the moment and not to place too much importance on our past. It forces us to accept that the best time of our lives, and our memory, is right now. And — Julia Shaw

No one can make you dwell on the past.
Control your thoughts and actions! Make your own decisions! Just because someone keeps bringing up your past doesn't mean you have to accept it --- you are not obligated to accommodate their recollections of you. — Michelle Word Hollis

If you still accept the idea of regret, it means you can't yet accept nor forgive your past laxity. — Toba Beta

what has happened is out of your and my control, we can't change that ever, but what we can do is forget. The worse things of past and accept your present with its purity and its real shine, remember my friend this is the only way you can live happily — Pritesh Bhosale

History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history
while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance
might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth. — Howard Zinn

The best part about owning it is that when you accept what really is, you stop living in the past or in some dream world and start living in the real world, where you can actually do something about what's wrong. It enables action and change, whereas when you deny the reality of your situation, you stagnate. You can't get to the breakthrough place where you see what's true and recognize what you need to change. Owning it is a way to release your demons and come out on the other side. — Bethenny Frankel

And that was exactly her gamble: that they'd accept her as the person she is now, coming back. She left here as a a naive young woman, and she has come back mature, with a life behind her, a difficult life that she's proud of. She means to do all she can to get them to accept her with her experiences of the past twenty years, with her convictions, her ideas; it'll be double or nothing: either she succeeds in being among them as the person she has become, or else she won't stay. — Milan Kundera

Accept I can't change the past. I can only concentrate on the now and hope for the future. — Alexandra Ivy

Reality is what I make it. That is what I have said I believed. Then I look at the hell I am wallowing in, nerves paralyzed, action nullified - fear, envy, hate: all the corrosive emotions of insecurity biting away at my sensitive guts. Time, experience: the colossal wave, sweeping tidal over me, drowning, drowning. How can I ever find that permanence, that continuity with past and future, that communication with other human beings that I crave? Can I ever honestly accept an artificial imposed solution? How can I justify, how can I rationalize the rest of my life away? — Sylvia Plath

For such people, the ruling gods are progress, science, and development. They imagine that we know so much more about the world than those people of olden times, because "we" have science. Of course, they themselves do not have science, they have simply heard and believed that scientific knowledge is real knowledge. They know little about the goals and methods of science, and nothing about the Islamic Intellectual tradition. They are blind imitators in intellectual issues, that is, on the level where they should be striving for their own understanding. What is worse, this is a selective imitation, since they only accept the authority of the "scientists" and the "experts", not that of the great Muslim thinkers of the past. If Einstein said it, it must be true, but if Al-Ghazali or Mulla Sadra said it, then it can't be true, because it isn't scientific. — William C. Chittick

You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better. — Andrew Solomon

We are only seeking Man. We have no need for other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior of our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past." -Snow from Solaris by Stanislaw Lem — Stanislaw Lem

He nods, looking through the pictures on the screen on the back of his camera. Some relationships can only exist as memories. But unlike ephemeral digital images that can be sorted and deleted, we can't erase the past. We have to learn to live with all the images that are stored in love's archive, memories tagged good and bad. No Photoshopping. Accept the negative before moving forward. — Shannon Mullen

Actually believe in your potential. You spend all day and all night daydreaming and sometimes talking to yourself... out loud, which people can see by the way so maybe consider stopping that, about all the things you wish you could be and do, but instead you doubt yourself and say its impossible, and instead of following your unrealistic dreams, you should accept that you're an average person that will never get lucky and should just do what the world seems to have laid out for you like.. study law at University.
That's not gonna go down well, just trust me there. You are a horrific procrastinator and one day you will just mature enough to look past what you have been told about the world, and decide to take it into your own hands, and that will finally make you happy. — Dan Howell

The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don't know if I accept everything even now. I don't know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there's a defiance in that, too. — Jeff VanderMeer

You can't have a future until you accept the past. That doesn't mean you have to live the way you used to, but it does mean you can't deny what made you who you are. You made mistakes. Own them and move on. — Tammy L. Gray

By dying young, a man stays young forever in people's memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his light shines for all time. In his musings during the past few weeks Vadim had discovered an important and at first glance paradoxical point: a man of talent can understand and accept death more easily than a man with none - yet the former has more to lose. A man of no talent craves long life, yet Epicurus had once observed that a fool, if offered eternity, would not know what to do with it. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is no feeling that is comparable to that of being truly lost. I don't mean lost in the woods, or desert, but lost in the way that only can happen internally. Lost to the deepest,
blackest pit of your soul, clinging to ghosts of past times, when you thought you knew who and
what you were. When this happens, you have two choices; you can give in to your darkest inclinations,
and accept what you are, or you can fight, knowing that it is a losing battle, that the good half
of your soul is strong, but can never erase the bad part. — H.D. Gordon

Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy's wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference." Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future. — Kurt Vonnegut

Is there a notion of hope (and of our responsibility to the future) that could be shared by believers and nonbelievers? What can it be based on now? Does an idea of the end, one that does not imply disinterest in the future but rather a constant examination of the errors of the past, have a critical function?

If not, it would be perfectly all right to accept the approach of the end, even without thinking about it, sitting in front of our TV screens (in the shelter of our electronic fortifications), waiting for someone to entertain us while meantime things go however they go. And to hell with what will come. — Umberto Eco

You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them — Iyanla Vanzant

Live a life abundant in love and rich in spirit, these are the seeds of a fulfilling existence. Be the safe harbor you seek in the world. Follow your dreams, not your fear.
Go into the New Year with an open mind and hopeful heart. Don't let the chains of unforgiveness weigh you down. Life is too short to live in a prison of past hurts. The futures is yours for the taking and creating.
Life is bittersweet, when we can let darkness and light co-exist as illumination, we can live in true happiness. When we live life at its best, it is a symphony of feelings, of high and low notes, of tragedy and comedy, love and loss, magic and the sublime. It can be quite a spectacular journey when we fully embrace and accept it. — Jaeda DeWalt

There is no one, and surely no entire people, in whom the image of God has been utterly extinguished. Faith in God means believing that anyone can be transformed, regardless of the past. To write off whole groups of people as intrinsically racist and violent is to accept the very same premise that upholds racist and oppressive regimes. — Walter Wink

Oh, Cole," she said, "the jewelry box is lovely - "
"It's not for jewelry."
She gazed up at him, surprised by his somber
tone. "Then what - "
"It's a memory box, Devon. Something in which to store all those memories you collect, so you'll never lose a single one." He paused, looking both tender and serious at once. "Unlike the wedding gift you gave me, this one comes with strings attached. If you accept it, I expect the next fifty years of your life in return to help fill it up."
Devon bit her lip to hide a wayward, trembling smile. "Only the next fifty?"
He shrugged. "We can negotiate after that."
She nodded, swallowing past the tight knot in her throat. "That sounds like a pretty fair deal to me. — Victoria Lynne

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think. — Lillian Smith

Letting go is to love yourself enough to look at the past with a different perspective. It is to accept that you can't change the past, but that you can change whether your perspective poisons or nourishes you. — Steve Maraboli

Peace can only be achieved by letting go of the past and accepting what is. — Abhishek Kumar

If, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens
if we are unaware that women even have a history
we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias. — Adrienne Rich

Before you can live a part of you has to die. You have to let go of what could have been, how you should have acted and what you wish you would have said differently. You have to accept that you can't change the past experiences, opinions of others at that moment in time or outcomes from their choices or yours. When you finally recognize that truth then you will understand the true meaning of forgiveness of yourself and others. From this point you will finally be free. — Shannon L. Alder

One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. When it isn't there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient's body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: Do you want your belly pressed against this person's belly forever
or not? — Elizabeth Gilbert

I would like you to accept only one prayer, and that is laughter, because when you are totally laughing you are in the present. You cannot laugh in the future and you cannot laugh in the past. All those people who have created this retarded humanity have taken away all juice, all laughter, all smiles, and dragged everybody into being inauthentic. And if you are inauthentic, insincere, you can never grow the seed that has been given to you by this great compassionate universe. — Rajneesh

We must drop the idea that change comes slowly. It does ordinarily - in part because we think it does. Today changes must come fast; and we must adjust our mental habits, so that we can accept comfortably the idea of stopping one thing and beginning another overnight. We must discard the idea that past routine, past ways of doing things, are probably the best ways. On the contrary, we must assume that there is probably a better way to do almost everything. We must stop assuming that a thing which has never been done before probably cannot be done at all. — Donald M. Nelson

Let us ... quietly accept our times, with the firm conviction that just as much good can be done today as at any time in the past, provided only that we have the will and the way to do it. — Etienne Gilson

Were they our betters? No. They are people like us, Aunt Abbie, no better than some and no worse than others. From what I have learned of their world I can say with confidence that they have not brought forth a paradise on Earth.
But if there is such a thing as progress, perhaps Futurcity is entitled to some part of the disdain with which they regard us.
Until the world is perfect we pay the price of progress by acknowledging the sins of the past. It is the business of the future to chastise us, and we ought to accept that chastisement. — Robert Charles Wilson

Genetics means that my parents really aren't my parents. I know Galen has thought this all along, but I still can't accept it. I also can't completely shun the possibility either. Especially after I just conducted a symphony of fish. How would I even start that conversation with my mom? "So, Galen thinks you've been lying to me for the past eighteen years." Even if I didn't say it directly, that's what it amounts to. And when she asks where I'd get an idea like that? "Well, I recently discovered I can hold my breath for almost two hours and tell fish what to do. I couldn't help but notice that you can't." Yeah, not happening. There's got to be some other way ... — Anna Banks

Active Love trains you to accept others as they are. Everyone in your life is imperfect, either because of something they've done in the past or something they can't change in the present. Fixating on these things destroys relationships. You need a tool that allows you to accept people despite their flaws. — Anonymous

We cannot erase the past, but we can accept it as history. — Gary Chapman

If you want to draw some advantage from your history, you must accept not only this miracle but also many others. In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out of loneliness receive caring teachers who are really the children themselves moved back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding lights to it to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence - legitimately - our choice of basic values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature - by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse - we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature - natural selection - gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy. — Robert Wright

To get over the past, you first have to accept that the past is over. No matter how many times you revisit it, analyze it, regret it, or sweat it ... it's over. It can hurt you no more. — Mandy Hale

One of the truths about suicide is that it's hardly ever about the future. It's the past the suicide can't face, and although disgrace appears to be the exception, the one instance where suicide seems to be about the future, even in Oedipus, it's her past Jocasta can't accept, once it's come to light. — Charles D'Ambrosio

The child must adapt to ensure the illusion of love, care, and kindness, but the adult does not need this illusion to survive. He can give up his amnesia and then be in a position to determine his actions with open eyes. Only this path will free him from his depression. Both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through his constant fear of losing "love." Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact. — Alice Miller

Yes, and even for the past ... that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was. Something I can accept. Mistakes made by the self I had to be or was not able to be. — Robert Frost

I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make a future. — Robert Penn Warren

There is nothing - no circumstance, no trouble, no testing - that can ever touch me until, first of all it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me. If it has come that far, it has come with a great purpose, which I may not understand at the moment. But as I refuse to become panicky, as I lift up my eyes to him and accept it as coming from the throne of God for some great purpose of blessing to my own heart, no sorrow will ever disturb me, no trial will ever disarm me, no circumstance will cause me to fret - for I shall rest in the joy of what my Lord is - That is the rest of victory.1 — Elizabeth George

Live your life the way you want to. Just don't live you life in the past. The past can you hurt you just as much as the present can. Just remember its your life. it's nobody's business accept for yours! — Hailey D.D. Klein

Until you're willing to accept what already is - the things of your past that you can't change - there's no space for you to create what you want. Acceptance is the key to unlocking the door to true peace, happiness, and freedom. — Hal Elrod

Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter. — Iain Banks

When you love someone you tend to tell them so much about your past because you're trying to catch up to the present moment. You're trying to say, my past has been bloody. My past has been as painful and pounding as an ear ache, but I am still here. I survived it. You're trying to say, here I am before you. I can be brutal. I can be as harsh and unforgiving as sun burn, but this is how I got to this moment. This is who I am. I am not always kind and lovely, I am so often fierce and cutting and unforgiving. I have made some mistakes I'm still trying to forgive myself for. Please accept it. Please try to love me for it. Here is the muscle and bone of me. It's frightening. It's a roller coaster. Here is the meat of me, after I've shed my skin, after I've left the cicada shell behind. It's manic. It's a monster, but it will try to love you well. It will try to leave fingerprints all over you. — Jessica Therese

I decline to accept the end of man ... I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. — William Faulkner

I will, from today, cease trying to impress others as being someone other than who I am or what I am. I will, from today try to express myself as I really am; no pretensions, no misrepresentations and no real concerns for what I think others expect of me. I'm just going to be me! I am going to forgive myself for all my human foibles and frailties, to date, and accept my many past indiscretions as natural and normal in a personal growth process. Oh what a relief - I'll just be the best me I can be and do the best I can. If I do the best I can - what more can any one want of me. — Melvin Hassan

We walk past the house with the blue door. It has been made clear to us that we are to walk quietly by this house, never accept an invitation to step inside, never return the smile of the woman of the house, nor glance at the old man who sometimes looks out of the upstairs window; at our peril are we to be tempted by the flowers lying under the eaves, or by the figs that the storms shake loose. But our shadows dare each other. One of them is foolish enough to climb on to the doorstep but is pulled away just before it can reach the door bell. — Nadeem Aslam

The past is now the past - done, finished, a part of my life which has been put away as one does a completed novel. Today, I can once again breathe the cool, refreshing air of springtime. Today, I can reflect on my life and accept myself as one who has made mistakes and rectified them. Today, I have found peace of mind. Today, the grave is open and my soul and I are reunited. Tom Saal, November 2010 — Kevin Sites

Love is the most important part of life, isn't it. If you have love you can live in this world in a true way and if you love each other you can see past everything and accept what you don't understand and forgive what you don't know or don't like. Love is all. Love is patient and boundless and right-hearted and long-suffering. I hope you may love each other all your days of life together. And I hope you may have a great many years of those days. — Kent Haruf

Vonnegut was talking," I say today, "about the psychic effects of trauma." There's a sentence of Alice Miller's looping in my mind, about grandiose people and depressives, Narcissus and Echo: "Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact." It's the main thing I've learned from reading all this psychology: the future is always trying to feel like the past. When it does, it feels like selfishness, hurt, loss at the hands of others. The trick is to let it empty. Maybe this is another way to come unstuck in time. — Kristin Dombek

Each new moment presents an opportunity for conscious choice. We can choose to let go of the past. We can choose to be here now. We can choose to accept responsibility for ourselves ... We can choose to awaken. Or we can choose to remain asleep and unconscious. — Leonard Jacobson

Man must be ready to say: Yes, since Cain there has been injustice, but we can only set the misery right if we accept a status quo. Lands have been robbed, men slain, nations humiliated. Let us now start fresh without remembrance, rather than live forward and backward at the same time. We cannot build the future by avenging the past. Let us sit down as brothers, and accept the Peace of God. — T.H. White

Reincarnation isn't something in which I choose to believe but rather a truth I accept. Most people will never know the meaning of their friendships, passions, choices and even challenges. I embrace them, knowing that there's always a perfect correlation between everything, including between us and the ones that love us and betray us at the end. That's how I know I'm almost never traveling somewhere but returning, or not meeting someone but fixing the past, or facing a challenge but ending a karmic cycle. If I was a Buddhist Monk, a Scottish Doctor, a French Monarch, or a Spanish Templar, none of that really matters, not as much as what I experienced and believed during that time, not as much as what I did ten years ago or what I believed during my childhood, not as much as who I am now and what I can do with my life at present time. — Robin Sacredfire

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

As time goes on we become old, the future contracts, the past expands ... But by future we don't just mean the years ahead; we always mean as well the plenitude of possibilities which challenge our creativity ... In confrontation with the future we can become young if we accept the future's challenges. — Jurgen Moltmann

To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. — James Baldwin