Quotes & Sayings About Confronting The Past

I take the rawest, realest moments in anyone's life and I open them up and lay them bare. The innocence of a five year old child, the awkwardness of a teenager's first sexual encounter, the heartbreak of longing for a relationship you can't have, confronting the possibility of the death of your newborn child, whatever it is, you open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day. You have to put yourself out there as a writer, you can't play it safe. Great writing isn't safe. — Dan Alatorre

There are 60 million generators in Nigeria. The generator owners and distributors have a strong incentive to not encourage the distribution of solar and other alternative energies, even though it's better for the country, it's better for people. As a world, we've got to get more serious about confronting those obstacles. This knows no culture, no race, no ethnicity. — Jacqueline Novogratz

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I had made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics. Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists. — M.C. Escher

Your objective is to avoid being on a string.
The first step, I think, is to get over the fear of losing a man by confronting him. Just stop being afraid, already. The most successful people in this world recognize that taking chances to get what they want is much more productive than sitting around being too scared to take a shot. The same philosophy can be applied to dating: if putting your requirements on the table means you risk him walking away, it's a risk you have to take. Because that fear can trip you up every time; all too many of you let the guy get away with disrespecting you, putting in minimal effort and holding on to the commitment to you because you're afraid he's going to walk away and you'll be alone again. And we men? We recognize this and play on it, big time. — Steve Harvey

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us. — Robert Macfarlane

People think of our life as harsh, and of course in many ways it is. But going into the unknown world and confronting it without a single rupee in our pockets means that differences between rich and poor, educated and illiterate, all vanish, and a common humanity emerges. As wanderers, we monks and nuns are free of shadows from the past. This wandering life, with no material possessions, unlocks our souls. There is a wonderful sense of lightness, living each day as it comes, with no sense of ownership, no weight, no burden. Journey and destination became one, thought and action became one, until it is as if we are moving like a river into complete detachment. — William Dalrymple

I know the thought of confronting your past terrifies you. It terrifies every man. But sometimes we don't do it for ourselves. We do it for the people we love more than ourselves. — Colleen Hoover

I found myself wanting the monster because it was honest, a level of honesty most go their entire lives without confronting, always content to hide behind their social masks and business cards. It — Kitty Thomas

The problem with confronting people who make these comments is that the most you will get out of it is mockery and reprisal by superiors. You are just one girl who got offended by the comment, while so many others adhere to it. — Kaitlyn Scarboro

The most dangerous type of atheism is not theoretical atheism, but practical atheism -that's the most dangerous type. And the world, even the church, is filled up with people who pay lip service to God and not life service. And there is always a danger that we will make it appear externally that we believe in God when internally we don't. We say with our mouths that we believe in him, but we live with our lives like he never existed. That is the ever-present danger confronting religion. That's a dangerous type of atheism. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Animals have this way of constantly confronting us with ultimate questions - about truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, God and sanctity and the soul - forcing us to define ourselves and our relationship to the world. — Matthew Scully

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death
ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. — James Baldwin

The simple reality of life is that everyone is wrong on a regular basis. By confronting these inevitable errors, you allow yourself to make corrections before it is too late. — Barry Ritholtz

The turmoil and dislocations confronting present-day society will not be solved until both the scientific and religious genius of the human race are fully utilized. — Baha'i International Community

The first truth, Buddha taught his disciples, is that suffering is part of the human condition. If we simply try to avoid confronting painful experiences, there is no way to begin the healing process. In fact, this denial creates the very conditions that promote and prolong unnecessary suffering. — Peter A. Levine

With traps and obstacles and hazards confronting us on every hand, only blindness or indifference will fail to turn in all humility, for guidance or for warning, to the study of examples. — Benjamin Cardozo

Tidying is the act of confronting yourself; cleaning is the act of confronting nature — Marie Kondo

A tree is a self: it is 'unseen shaping' more than it is leaves or bark, roots or cellulose or fruit ... What this means is that we must address trees as we must address all things, confronting them in the awareness that we are in the presence of numinous mystery. — Brian Swimme

Without a doubt it was Dr. Urbino's most contagious initiative, for opera fever infected the most surprising elements in the city and gave rise to a whole generation of Isoldes and Otellos and Aidas and Siegfrieds. But it never reached the extremes Dr. Urbino had hoped for, which was to see Italianizers and Wagnerians confronting each other with sticks and canes during the intermissions. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome, Pandora's box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner. — Irvin D. Yalom

The ostrich-approach of burying your head in the sand, when confronting your areas of weakness, becomes a self-set trigger for failure. — Archibald Marwizi

And I squinted hard trying to see Nikki's face and even from a block away I could tell she was smiling the whole time and was so very happy , and some how that was enough for me to officially end apart time and roll the credits of my movie without even confronting Nikki . — Matthew Quick

Ignoring the pain is more desirable than confronting it. And that's survival one-oh-one. — Siobhan Davis

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds. — Don DeLillo

I'm not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would the future be — Arthur Golden

When difficulties seem insurmountable, optimists react in a more constructive and creative way. They accept the facts with realism, know how to rapidly identify the positive in adversity, draw lessons from it, and come up with an alternative solution or turn to a new project. Pessimists would rather turn away from the problem or adopt escapist strategies - sleep, isolation, drug or alcohol abuse - that diminish their focus on the problem.9 Instead of confronting them with resolve, they prefer to brood over their misfortunes, nurture illusions, dream up "magic" solutions, and accuse the whole world of being against them. They have a hard time drawing lessons from the past, which often leads to the repetition of their problems. They are more fatalistic ("I told you it wouldn't work. It's always the same, no matter what I do") and are quick to see themselves as "mere pawns in the game of life. — Matthieu Ricard

This is the moment too many couples struggle in vain to avoid or ignore - even to the point of choosing bitter divorce and fractured family over the daunting task of confronting the sky together, with all the "confident girders" behind them in the past. — Christopher Ryan

But the Gnostics were too remote for me to establish any link with them in regard to the questions that were confronting me. As far as I could see, the tradition that might have connected Gnosis with the present seemed to have been severed, and for a long time it proved impossible to find any bridge that led from Gnosticism - or neo-Platonism - to the contemporary world. But when I began to understand alchemy I realized that it represented the historical link with Gnosticism, and that a continuity therefore existed between past and present. Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.27 — C. G. Jung

But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you. — Bret Easton Ellis

He's not a safe safe or a tame God, securely lodged behind the bars of a distant Heaven; He has the most annoying manner of showing up when we least want Him; of confronting us in the strangest ways. — Thomas Merton

With the defeat of the Reich and pending the emergence of the Asiatic, the African and, perhaps, the South American nationalisms, there will remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other-the United States and Soviet Russia. The laws of both history and geography will compel these two Powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the fields of economics and ideology. (2nd April 1945) — Adolf Hitler

Only by confronting your demons can you ever hope to conquer them. — Ellen Hopkins

My style as a human being is to indulge people who need to escape, yet I insist on confronting them as a playwright. It's quite embarrassing, it's quite unpleasant, it's quite awkward. — Wallace Shawn

The choices we make now will shape the future of not just our countries, but the world at large. We should intensify our cooperation in confronting global challenges like Terrorism, Cyber Security and Climate Change. — Narendra Modi

And confronting these men, wild and terrible as we agree that they were, there were men of quite another kind, smiling and adorned with ribbons and stars, silk stockinged, yellow gloved and with polished boots; men who insisted on the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages, of divine right, of bigotry, ignorance, enslavement, the death penalty and war, and who, talking in polished undertones, glorified the sword and the executioners' block. For our part, if we had to choose between the barbarians of civilization and those civilized upholders of barbarism we would choose the former. — Victor Hugo

All too often, parents and kids struggle to find an empathetic ear when confronting bullying situation; these escalate and too often result in marginalization, on top of what may well be a daily gauntlet of harassment and abuse that is fundamentally torture. — Lee Hirsch

Behold our refutation of the error. It is not based on documents of faith, but on the reasons and statements of the philosophers themselves. If then anyone there be who, boastfully taking pride in his supposed wisdom, wishes to challenge what we have written, let him not do it in some corner nor before children who are powerless to decide on such difficult matters. Let him reply openly if he dare. He shall find me there confronting him, and not only my negligible self, but many another whose study is truth. — Thomas Aquinas

Ultimately, all I wanted was for players to feel like they were in the real world. I wanted them to be able to apply real world common sense to the problems confronting them, and I thought recreating real world locations would encourage that kind of thinking. There's also just a real power, a real thrill, when you fire up a game and see a place you've been or want to go, and then get to do all the stuff you WANT to do there but know you'll get arrested if you try! If that isn't the stuff of fantasy - far more than exploring some goofy dwarven mine or alien spaceship - I don't know what is! — Warren Spector

[He] had seen firsthand the horrific results of appeasement. It was a path chosen by feebleminded people who were morally incapable of confronting evil. He saw many parallels between the Nazis, the communists, and these jihadists. They were all sociopaths at heart
obsessed with their own tribal desires and utterly incapable of conferring justice or compassion on those outside the tribe. If you were not one of them, you were a lesser human, and thus deserved to be treated in any way they saw fit. And if that meant blowing up airliners and buses full of innocent civilians, then so be it. — Vince Flynn

A person's industrious and creative mindset can overcome great obstacles that besiege their existence. Humankind's greatest unraveling is our propensity to panic when confronting the pealing silence of nothingness. — Kilroy J. Oldster

A truley heroic way of life lies in squarely confronting and courageously overcoming the pounding vicissitudes that life always throws in our paths — Daisaku Ikeda

Diversion is pernicious to depressives. Our lives are like waking dreams
correction, nightmares
where monsters chase us, never breaking off pursuit in order to rest or to eat or to look for easier prey. Diversion prevents us from confronting those monsters. If we never confront them, we have no hope of ever defeating them. Diversion does NOT work. — Northern Adams

If someone is confronting our essential liberties, if someone is inflicting injuries and harm, by God I'll confront them! — Margaret Thatcher

The flight from self is concealed beneath the flight from one's setting and way of life. It will be better elsewhere; it used to be better back then. In short, the here and now become unbearable. Alone and confronting himself, beneath the noonday sun, the monk can no longer see or hear himself; he no longer tolerates himself. His illusory salvation lies in desertion.1 This — Jean-Charles Nault

We've got to find ways of confronting the issues that divide - and at the heart of cultural issues, you often find religions. — George Carey

As mercy is God's goodness confronting human misery and guilt, so grace is his goodness directed toward human debt and demerit. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

How can we who are so weak in ourselves, so inferior in power to the enemies confronting us, bear up under our trials which are so numerous, so protracted, so crushing? We could not, and therefore Divine grace has provided for us an all-sufficient Helper. Without His aid we had long since succumbed, mastered by our trials. Hope looks forward to the Glory to come; in the weary interval of waiting, the Spirit supports our poor hearts and keeps grace alive within us. — Arthur W. Pink

The real evil is usually the element that makes one nervous while they are confronting or exposing it. — Walid Shoebat