Past Short Quotes & Sayings

Life's too short to be stuck in your own past — Neil Strauss

The Obama administration's attempted short-term fixes, even with unprecedented monetary easing by the Federal Reserve, produced average GDP growth of just 2.2% over the past three years, and the consensus outlook appears no better for the year ahead. — Glenn Hubbard

The twins were loitering over their cereal, and Mrs. Walpole, with one eye on the clock and the other on the kitchen window past which the school bus would come in a matter of minutes, felt the unreasonable irritation that comes with being late on a school morning, the wading-through-molasses feeling of trying to hurry children. — Shirley Jackson

In a congregation meeting, the pastor encouraged the congregation to make a new commitment to serve the people [at the trailer park]. One person stood up and said that past efforts had failed because the church lacked organization. Another person said that the church failed due to a lack of knowledge regarding the people's practical needs. Still another said that the church lacked evangelistic zeal.
In each case, the person offering criticism had the gifts to make the effort succeed! The person who saw a lack of organization had the gift of administration. The person who saw the lack of concern for practical needs had the gift of mercy. And the person who thought the church lacked evangelistic zeal had the gift of evangelism. What should have been a very successful outreach was short-circuited because they had not been using their gifts, the very gifts that were needed most. — Timothy Lane

The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially the play, story, public oration, and personal essay. — Robert Scholes

To give a character life in a short space of time, it helps if you arrive on screen with a past. — Jeanne Moreau

Larry's short list for doing better: Stop complaining about your results. (No one really cares, anyway.) Whining about the problem only prolongs the problem. Take a realistic look at your results and think about what you have done or not done in the past that contributed to them. Go to the closest mirror, look yourself in the eye, and say, "This is all my fault." Take responsibility. Do a reality check and admit that change has been going on for a good long while and you survived. You will survive this, too. Make a list of what you are going to do differently in the future to change your results. Doing better is the result of deciding to do better and then taking action on that decision. Get — Larry Winget

Following their line of vision, he found the distraction. The damn tennis team, running the perimeter of the football field in some half-assed formation, following their fearless leader. They weren't looking at the field, weren't yelling or causing a scene. Just concentrating on keeping up with Chris.
Having been a teenage boy himself, the draw was obvious. Teenage girls. Short shorts. No brainer. At thirty-four, he was past that.
Except his eyes didn't seem to get the "I'm Too Old For This" memo. They were tracking Chris like a hawk tracks a field mouse. — Jeanette Murray

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'. — George Orwell

I think that if past lives are real then we have been lovers in every single one of them. I've known you for a short time, but I feel like I've known you forever. — J.A. Redmerski

Life is divided into three periods: that which has been, that which is, that which will be. Of these the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain. — Seneca The Younger

We all need lots of powerful long range goals to help us past the short-term obstacles — Jim Rohn

His importance to the century just past, and therefore his status as a figure in history as well as in literature, derives from the extraordinary salience of the subjects he 'took on,' and stayed with, and never abandoned. As a consequence, we commonly use the term 'Orwellian' in one of two ways. To describe a state of affairs as 'Orwellian' is to imply crushing tyranny and fear and conformism. To describe a piece of writing as 'Orwellian' is to recognize that human resistance to these terrors is unquenchable. Not bad for one short lifetime. — Christopher Hitchens

I don't want to play old music. To me, it is fighting battles that are already over and calling yourself a warrior. For me, I see no courage or adventure in doing the old thing over again. If others want to, that's for them. For myself, I have to move on. Life is too short to live in the past. There is a lot to be done. — Henry Rollins

Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else. — A.J.P. Taylor

She doesnt want your dark embrace. She'll let you hold her for a short time but she won't submit to that kind of weakness and she'll only let you get so close. In the past it was easier pushing you into the arms of another rather than face what was or what could be. She doesn't want to love; not now, so she'll close the door and toss the key. — Donna Lynn Hope

And consider this which is near to thee, this boundless abyss of the past and of the future in which all things disappear. How then is he not a fool who is puffed up with such things or plagued about them and makes himself miserable? for they vex him only for a time, and a short time. Think — Marcus Aurelius

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense. — James Joyce

In short, on the basis of horse sense and the best scientific information, there was nothing good to be said for the exploration of space. The time was long past when one nation could seem more glorious than another by hurling some heavy object into nothingness. — Kurt Vonnegut

Winners live in the present tense. People who come up short are consumed with future or past. I want to be living in the now. — Alex Rodriguez

I'm very surprised at Carol didn't get a best picture. Todd Haynes is an Academy darling, his period pieces are nothing short of brilliant, and they hold up. And I definitely feel like Carol speaks to, even though it's set in the past, it speaks to themes we're dealing with in life right now. It's really really shocking that it didn't get it. — Bun B.

Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now. She will never suffer more in this world. She is gone after a hard, short conflict ... Yes there is no Emily in time or on earth now. Yesterday we put her poor, wasted, mortal frame quietly under the chancel pavement. We are very calm at present. Why shoud we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone by; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need now to trouble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them. — Charlotte Bronte

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures. — Robert Penn Warren

I am convinced that being fully committed to the moment, without any worries about the past or projections into the future, is the best attribute a closer can have. You wonder why the shelf life of so many short relievers is, well, so short? Why guys can be unhittable for a year or two and then disappear? It's because it takes a ton of concentration, and self-belief, to stay in the moment in this way and not let the highs and lows mess with your psyche. — Mariano Rivera

From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past. — Lion Feuchtwanger

There was a pier filled with thousands of people, men and women, fathers and mothers and children
so many children
children from the past and the present, children who had not yet been born, side by side, hand in hand, in caps, in short pants, filling the boardwalk and the rides and the wooden platforms, sitting on each other's shoulders, sitting in each other's laps. They were there, or would be there, becuause of the simple mundane things [he] had done in his life, the accidents he had prevented, the rides he had kept safe, the unnoticed turns he had affected every day. And while their lips did not move, [he] heard their voices, more voices then he could have imagined, and a peace came upon him that he had never known before. — Mitch Albom

Look at the United States today. We have made mistakes in the past. We have had shortcomings. We shall make mistakes in the future and fall short of our own best hopes. — Henry Cabot Lodge

Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid. In the past, whenever I had fallen short in almost any undertaking, it was seldom because I had tried and failed. It was because I had let fear of failure stop me from trying at all. — Arthur Gordon Webster

He could pick my heart like a rose and watch it wither in his hand. Sometimes I think he is like that. At other times I think he is as simple and golden and generous as our father's fields. And then I see things in his eyes - things that I have never looked at, and I know that I have walked a short and easy road out of my past, while he has walked a thousand roads to meet me. I know Perrin's past; the same road runs into his future. I don't know Corbet. — Patricia A. McKillip

The past sucks and the future can be outright paralyzing, but we must push through those times and find what little happy moments there are in our short, short lives - Emilio — Emilio

This mortal probation is a brief period-just a short span, linking the eternity of the past with the eternity of the future. Yet it was to be a period of tremendous importance. It is, in fact, the most vital period of our entire eternal existence. In this mortal state we come face to face with innumerable temptations and pressures. Sometimes we come in contact with advocates of wrongdoing, disobedience, and sin. Lucifer is going about tempting those who can be tempted to see if he can lead them astray. — ElRay L. Christiansen

And before you say this is all far-fetched, just think how far the human race has come in the past ten years. If someone had told your parents, for example, that they would be able to carry their entire music library in their pocket, would they have believed it? Now we have phones that have more computing power than was used to send some of the first rockets into space. We have electron microscopes that can see individual atoms. We routinely cure diseases that only fifty years ago was fatal. and the rate of change is increasing. Today we are able to do what your parents would of dismissed as impossible and your grandparents nothing short of magical. — Nicolas Flamel

If you had saved $20 per week for just ten weeks, you could have bought the scratch-and-dent model off the floor at the same Rent-to-Own store for $200! Or you could have bought a used set out of the classifieds or online. It pays to look past the weekend and suffer through going to the Laundromat with your quarters. When you think short term, you always set yourself up for being ripped off by a predatory lender. If the Red-Faced Kid ("I want it, and I want it now!") rules your life, you will stay broke! — Dave Ramsey

Opportunities for kindness are flowing past us continuously, during the hours we spend at home, in the office or store or shop or laboratory where we work, as we walk along the street, as we drive hither and yon, as we travel by train or plane or bus - in short, wherever we are and whatever we are doing. — David Dunn

Would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take a terrible vengeance. So he sweated and fired up and watched the glass fearfully (with an impromptu charm, made of rags, tied to his arm, and a piece of polished bone, as big as a watch, stuck flatways through his lower lip), while the wooded banks slipped past us slowly, the short noise was left behind, the interminable miles of silence - and we crept on, towards Kurtz. — Joseph Conrad

Most people imagine that the explosion in the U.S. prison population during the past twenty-five years reflects changes in crime rates. Few would guess that our prison population leaped from approximately 350,000 to 2.3 million in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not changes in crime rates. Yet it has been changes in our laws - particularly the dramatic increases in the length of our prison sentences - that have been responsible for the growth of our prison system, not increases in crime. One study suggests that the entire increase in the prison population from 1980 to 2001 can be explained by sentencing policy changes. — Michelle Alexander

When does real love begin?
At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity.
At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love?
At first power, power, then the wound, and love, and love and fears, and the loss of the self, and the gift, and slavery. At first I ruled, loved less; then more, then slavery. Slavery to his image, his odor, the craving, the hunger, the thirst, the obsession. — Anais Nin

Life is short. Time is short. As we get older, time does quicken. It's long, and it's long pertaining to that thought, that the past is not done with you because you can't rid of it. — Philip Seymour Hoffman

In all nature there seemed to be a feeling of hopelessness and pain. The earth, like a ruined woman sitting alone in a dark room and trying not to think of the past, was brooding over memories of spring and summer and apathetically waiting for the inevitable winter. Wherever one looked, on all sides, nature seemed like a dark, infinitely deep, cold pit from which neither Kirilov nor Abogin nor the red half-moon could escape ... — Anton Chekhov

More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists , and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track. — Ronald Fisher

I will argue that five features are present in a wide range of genres, Western and non-Western, past and present, and that they jointly contribute to a sense of tonality: 1. Conjunct melodic motion. Melodies tend to move by short distances from note to note. 2. Acoustic consonance. Consonant harmonies are preferred to dissonant harmonies, and tend to be used at points of musical stability. 3. Harmonic consistency. The harmonies in a passage of music, whatever they may be, tend to be structurally similar to one another. 4. Limited macroharmony. I use the term "macroharmony" to refer to the total collection of notes heard over moderate spans of musical time. Tonal music tends to use relatively small — Dmitri Tymoczko

I was right when I said a very long time ago that our age would leave few living documents behind it: it was rare for anyone to keep a diary, letters were short and businesslike--"I'm alive and well"--and few memoirs were written. There are many reasons for this. Let me mention just one, not perhaps recognized by everybody: we were too often at loggerheads with our own past to give it proper thought. Within the half-century, our ideas on people and events have changed many times; conversations were broken off in mid-sentence; thoughts and feelings could not but be affected by circumstances. — Ilya Ehrenburg

I'm focussing on what I haven't attained, not what I have. A lot has come to me early. I don't want to get consumed with that. Winners live in the present tense. People who come up short are consumed with future or past. I want to be living in the now. My goal is to play one full game in the now, but I haven't even gotten past the first inning yet. I start thinking about where my mom is or if my dogs have been fed. The average human has 2,000 thoughts a day. The really accomplished have 1,500 because you can focus longer. I need to learn how to focus longer. — Alex Rodriguez

I have in the past tended to overestimate the amount of change I can affect in the short run and then not fully appreciate the change I can affect in the long run. And so I've learned that it's critical to think carefully about the pace of change, and it's something that I've learned the hard way. — Harry West

Sicarius stood behind them, not bothering to hide his face as the breeze rifled through his short blond hair. He hadn't drawn a weapon yet, and Amaranthe hurried to catch up, to keep him from doing so.
First one security man glanced over his shoulder and jumped, then the second emulated the move.
Sespian lifted a hand. "Don't hurt - "One of the men pointed to the side of Sicarius, cried, "Look, enforcers!" and hurled himself past Sespian and into the river. The second man squeaked, scuttled backward until his shoulders rammed against the railing, then grabbed it and also propelled himself into the water. His lantern caught and dropped to the deck instead of falling overboard. It clanked and highlighted a dubious puddle before tipping over and winking out. Amaranthe had forgotten how much Sicarius's reputation affected the average person. — Lindsay Buroker

She stepped over two small girls (she wasn't certain who they belonged to) playing with tanks in the middle of the hall and snuck past a sort of possible second cousin carrying two lit candles. The Gray Man lifted his arms above his head to avoid being ignited by the second cousin, who clucked at him.
"Life's short."
"And getting shorter every day."
"So you see my point."
"I never disputed it. — Maggie Stiefvater

The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime. — Larry Niven

In history, we are concerned with what has been and what is; in philosophy, however, we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or to the future, but with that which is, both now and eternally - in short, with reason. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

But nothing happened there now of a nature to provoke a disturbance. There were no complaints to the management or the police, and the dark glory of the upper galleries was a legend in such memories as that of the late Emiel Kroger and the present Pablo Gonzales, and one by one, of course, those memories died out and the legend died out with them. Places like the Joy Rio and the legends about them make one more than usually aware of the short bloom and the long fading out of things. ("The Mysteries of the Joy Rio") — Tennessee Williams

Life is divided into three periods, past, present and future. Of these, the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain. For this last is the one over which Fortune has lost her power, which cannot be brought back to anyone's control. — Seneca.

Tell me, Channon," he said suddenly, "do you like teaching?"

"Some days. But it's the research I like best. I love digging through old manuscripst and trying to piece together the past."

He gave a short, half laugh. "No offense, but that sound incredibly boring."

"I imagine dragon slaying is much more action-oriented."

"Yes, it is. Every moment is completely unpredictable. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

My own duty as a teacher ... is not so much to interpret Beethoven, Wagner, or other masters of the past, but to give what encouragement I can to the young musicians of America. I ... hope that just as this nation has already surpassed so many others in marvelous inventions and feats of engineering and commerce, and has made an honorable place for itself in literature in one short century, so it must assert itself on the ... art of music ... To bring about this result, we must trust the very youthful enthusiasm and patriotism of this country. — Antonin Dvorak

Alone among all creatures, the species that styles itself wise, Homo sapiens, has an abiding interest in its distant origins, knows that its allotted time is short, worries about the future and wonders about the past. — John Noble Wilford

He walked to the exit, skirting the pools of vapor light purely out of habit, but he saw that the last lamp was unavoidable, because it was set directly above the exit gate. So he saved himself a further perimeter diversion by walking through the next-to-last pool of light, too. At which point a woman stepped out of the shadows. She came toward him with a distinctive burst of energy, two fast paces, eager, like she was pleased to see him. Her body language was all about relief. Then it wasn't. Then it was all about disappointment. She stopped dead, and she said, "Oh." She was Asian. But not petite. Five-nine, maybe, or even five-ten. And built to match. Not a bone in sight. No kind of a willowy waif. She was about forty, Reacher guessed, with black hair worn long, jeans and a T-shirt under a short cotton coat. She had lace-up shoes on her feet. He said, "Good evening, ma'am." She was looking past his shoulder. He said, "I'm the only passenger. — Lee Child

When I returned, I never once walked past the house where my mother, aunt, and I lved together...It was as if the past would judge me. The house would judge me. That merely looking at it would somehow cause me to calibrate my life, and in all aspects of usefulness I would come up short. — Howard Norman

Oh yes," she said, quickly. "I know all that. But don't talk of it - seven or six years - where may we all be by that time?" "They will soon glide by, and it will seem an astonishingly short time to look back upon when they are past - much less than to look forward to now. — Thomas Hardy

History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings. — Grace Lee Boggs

When you see the right thing, do it - this may look like more work in the short term, but it's the path of least effort in the long run. If you don't know what the right thing is, do the minimum necessary to get the job done, at least until you figure out what the right thing is. To do the Unix philosophy right, you have to be loyal to excellence. You have to believe that software design is a craft worth all the intelligence, creativity, and passion you can muster. Otherwise you won't look past the easy, stereotyped ways of approaching design and implementation; you'll rush into coding when you should be thinking. You'll carelessly complicate when you should be relentlessly simplifying - and then you'll wonder why your code bloats and debugging is so hard. — Eric S. Raymond

Winning is euphoric, but it lasts a short time. You've got to lap it up, then move on to the next thing. I think I've kept winning because I haven't attached myself to past successes. — Stephanie Gilmore

Ten minutes, good, past eleven." "My blood!" ejaculated the vexed coachman, "and not atop of Shooter's yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!" The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative, made a decided scramble for it, and the three other horses followed — Charles Dickens

Our physical health is dependent upon energy. We have a short lifespan compared with past Yuga's. We are made up of energy lines. The reason people lived longer is because there was less negative energy in the world. — Frederick Lenz

People misunderstood death, they died not of too little life but of too much life, that as the skin withered and the future grew short it was the past that took on flesh, until ultimately the sheer accumulation of experience and memory became too heavy to carry. — Dorothy Gilman

Some read biographies of famous Christians to try to short-cut themselves into a deeper walk with the Lord and successful ministry. They think: "If I just copy some of their techniques, beliefs, and quotes, I will have their success." Such thinking, though, creates men who trust in the past work of other believers, living out of their zeal instead of tapping into the actual power of God which these men had. True men of God are only signposts to point the way. Their sign should point to heaven, to the Lord himself. — Greg Gordon

Psychology has a long past, but only a short history — Herman Ebbinghaus

You pompous little bitch!" the infuriated Were shouted, red-faced and with his thugs backing him. "What are you doing here?"
Mrs. Sarong pushed past the men who had put themselves in front of her. "Arranging your removal," she said, her voice sharp and her eyes glaring. Removal? As if he were an overgrown tree clogging the sewer line?
The short businessman seemed to choke on his own breath, becoming choleric. Mouth gaping to look like one of his prize fish, he struggled to respond. "Like hell you are!" he finally managed. "That's what I wanted to talk to her about!"
From my shoulder came a small, "Holy crap, Rache. How did you become Cincy's assassin of choice? — Kim Harrison

Life is much too short to waste time wallowing in the past especially when the future hands you a second chance.

Chakotay Talking to B'Ellana (When she asks him why he isn't mad her for lying about her and Miral being dead)
Book:Unworthy: pg. 121 — Kirsten Beyer

Letting go is never easy. There is no short-cut or trick to it. You must be committed enough to your future to let go of your past. It's not easy and it's likely to hurt, but it is for the best. — Steve Maraboli

The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past. — Robert Frost

The smell of grease in the Horseshoe Diner was strong, like the residuals of every meal that had ever been cooked over its open griddle. I lingered in a corner booth near the window, speaking to my wife Ava on the cell phone. With as much free time as a corpse, I pondered past mistakes, but I kept the call short before she asked too many questions and revived the dying thoughts in my mind. A man was a sharp and useful tool, I thought, as long as he never paused to consider it. — Christopher Klim

Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars ... The stakes are immense, the task colossal the time is short. But we may hope- we must hope- that man's own creation, man's own genius, will not destroy him. — Albert Einstein

Their words flitted past, like short sentences typed out on a keyboard, typing away Yosop's past and future. They all said "American troops," but Yosop knew for a fact that the troops had simply been passing through. They were never stationed in Sinchon; they were in a rush to get further north. Both Yosop and his brother Yohan knew for a fact that during those forty-five days, before the arrival of the U.S. troops and after their departure, most of the military strength in the area had consisted of the security forces and the Youth Corps - all Korean. (2007: 99) — Hwang Sok-yong

In a broader sense, the value of heirlooms is always, as I have said, an historical value, derived from acts of production, use, or appropriation that have involved the object in the past. The value of an heirloom is really that of actions: actions whose significance has been, as it were, absorbed into the object's current identity - whether the emphasis is placed on the inspired labors of the artist who created it, the lengths to which some people have been known to go to acquire it, or the fact that it was once used to cut off a mythical giant's head. Since the value of the actions has already been fixed in the physical being of the object, it is perhaps a short leap to begin attributing the agency behind such actions to the object as well, and speak, as Mauss does, of valuables that transfer themselves from owner to owner or actively influence their owners' fates. The — David Graeber

In short, chronological connectivity puts us in touch with the holy. It is at once humbling and exhilarating. I say this as someone who has never followed any formal religious practice. Connection with the past and the future is a pathway that charms us in the direction of sanity and grace. — James Howard Kunstler

Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persuaded him otherwise.
Has it? — Dan Simmons

When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist's perception of his discipline's past. More than the practitioners of other creative fields, he comes to see it as leading in a straight line to the discipline's present vantage. In short, he comes to see it as progress. No alternative is available to him while he remains in the field. — Thomas S. Kuhn

I've learned to appreciate what I've got. I'm not going to waste an ounce of energy on sorting through the past or with worrying about the future. Life's too short for that. — Chris Coppernoll

Life is divided into three parts: what was, what is and what shall be. Of these three periods, the present is short, the future is doubtful and the past alone is certain. — Seneca.

I think life is far too short to concentrate on your past. I rather look into the future. — Lou Reed

Life, as he conceived of it, was a long decline from a glorious past, and if a reader approaches a newspaper in that spirit, he can find much to confirm him in his belief, particularly if he has never examined any short period of the past in day-to-day detail. — Robertson Davies

Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short. — Hermann Ebbinghaus

The last rain had come at the beginning of April and now, at the first of June, all but the hardiest mosquitoes had left their papery skins in the grass. It was already seven o'clock in the morning, long past time to close windows and doors, trap what was left of the night air slightly cooler only by virtue of the dark. The dust on the gravel had just enough energy to drift a short distance and then collapse on the flower beds. The sun had a white cast, as if shade and shadow, any flicker of nuance, had been burned out by its own fierce center. There would be no late afternoon gold, no pale early morning yellow, no flaming orange at sunset. If the plants had vocal cords they would sing their holy dirges like slaves. — Jane Hamilton

Swish, the net sounded like the blast of a cannon, signaling the game was tied at 64. Dave then saw the second shot in his mind before even going into his pre-shot routine. The ball tickled the front rim, brushed against the backboard, and then dropped through the net. The home crowd erupted as Dave backpedaled toward the opposing rim. Central High attempted a last-second shot that fell short into Breslin's hands. The fans rushed onto the floor as the number two train came roaring into the station, bringing Dave back from his glorious past back into the oppressive heat of the present. — Phil Wohl

She liked this. Liked the closeness. With lover's she'd taken in the past, things had been short and sweet. She certainly hadn't stuck about to snuggle in case they started to get ideas, not after the first time. Killing a guy you'd fucked was one thing, but to kill one you'd snuggled with damn near broke a girl's heart — Mina Carter

My grandfather used to say, "Learn to like art, music and literature deeply and passionately. They will be your friends when things are bad". It is true: at this time of year, when days are short and dark, and one hardly dares to open the newspapers, I turn, not vainly either, to the great creators of the past for distraction, solace and help. — Paul Johnson

And what nags me about this is that the source of my anxiety was exactly what Kierkegaard says the source of anxiety is, and what he praised in direct proportion to the volume any person possesses: possibility. The awareness that life is a series of choices any one of which could be either aggrandizing or disastrous. That this happens to be true I have no trouble signing on to. Any who has lived past the age of ten knows that even piddling actions can wind up having big consequences, and that even when you are super-conscious of your behaviors you can't know how things are going to turn out in the short- or the long-run. That's the drama of it all. On the one hand, your very existence means you can and will change things in your life and others. On the other hand, you aren't God, so everything is always going to be drenched in uncertainty and doubt. — Daniel Smith

In short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him goloshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life. — Anton Chekhov

Books educate people and educated people ask awkward questions of those who govern them. The educated, in short, are considered ungovernable. Better to keep people ignorant of the past and to concentrate their minds on the utopia that lies ahead. — The Economist

But I've come to the point where I'm not sure anymore just what God counts as radical. And I suspect that for me, getting up and doing the dishes when I'm short on sleep and patience is far more costly and necessitates more of a revolution in my heart than some of the more outwardly risky ways I've lived in the past. And so this is what I need now: the courage to face an ordinary day - an afternoon with a colicky baby where I'm probably going to snap at my two-year old and get annoyed with my noisy neighbor - without despair, the bravery it takes to believe that a small life is still a meaningful life, and the grace to know that even when I've done nothing that is powerful or bold or even interesting that the Lord notices me and is fond of me and that that is enough. — Michael S. Horton

My short-term factual memory can be like water; events are a brief disturbance on the surface and then it closes back up again, as if nothing ever touched it. But it's a strange fact that my long-term memory remains strong, perhaps because it recorded events when my mind was unaffected. My emotional memory is intact too, perhaps because feelings are recorded and stored in a different place than facts. The things that happened deeper in the past, and deeper in the breast, are still there for me, under the water.
I won 1,098 games, and eight national championships, and coached in four different decades. But what I see are not the numbers. I see their faces.
'Pat should get a tattoo!' The kids laughed. 'What kind should she get?'
'A heart. She should get a heart.'
Little did they know. They are the tattoos. — Pat Summitt

When teachers are forced to teach to the test, students get bored and genuine education ceases, no matter what the test scores may say ... The examination as a test of the past is of no value for increased learning ability. Like all external motivators, it can produce a short term effect, but examinations for the purpose of grading the past do not hook a student on learning for life. — Myron Tribus

For the past year, food of some sort has been a permanent appendage to Deo's hand. Sometimes both hands at once. At first, I teased that he was going to get fat, but then he shot upward - six full inches since last summer. Now I have to look up at him, not the other way around. This amuses him. I don't really care as long as he doesn't call me "Short Stuff. — Rysa Walker

[Memory] ... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense ... Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world. — John Daniel

Nope." I hung up, bought an iced tea from a sausage grill, then stared at the bay. The water was clean and blue, and Catalina was in sharp relief twenty-six miles away. A young woman in short-shorts and a metallic blue bikini top Rollerbladed past on the bicycle path. I followed her motion but did not see her. The detective in thoughtful mode. I — Robert Crais

Sometimes it was easier to stay and suffer for the short term than to have a permanent scar reminding you of the past. — Peter Monn

But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future. — Seneca.

We need to move past the idea that a critical evaluation of our country's past (and its present, for that matter) means we are anti-American or unpatriotic. We can be proud of our country and its many positive features and noble ideas while still pointing out where we as a nation have come up short or been plainly wrong. — Wayne Gordon

If there is any one person you can't love, then you don't understand love. The bitter cup we have to drink is the dregs of humility; we must see past the outer shells of insecurity to the seed of divinity deep inside each one of us.
No one virtue is strong enough to stand on its own. No one vice is simple enough not to lead to all others. No one person can appreciate and support us as much as we need. No one event is enough to tear apart our lives.
What does this all mean?
We have to give everything or we will have nothing. We cannot take any short cuts. We have to love everyone, or we cannot truly love anyone. No excuse will mean anything to us in the end.
People are beautiful, don't forget that.
Don't let pomp and circumstance, society or folklore fool you with counterfeit beauty.
True beauty is usually not something you can see, but something you feel; something that inspires you. — Michael Brent Jones

When chemists have brought their knowledge out of their special laboratories into the laboratory of the world, where chemical combinations are and have been through all time going on in such vast proportions,-when physicists study the laws of moisture, of clouds and storms, in past periods as well as in the present,-when, in short, geologists and zoologists are chemists and physicists, and vice versa,-then we shall learn more of the changes the world has undergone than is possible now that they are separately studied. — Louis Agassiz

It would be one hell of an addition to someone's scrapbook. (Dark City Lights) — Bill Bernico

History, insofar as it accustoms human beings to comprehend the whole of the past and to hasten forward with its conclusions into the far future, conceals the boundaries of birth and death, which enclose the life of the human being so narrowly and oppressively, and with a kind of optical illusion, expands his short existence into endless space, leading the individual imperceptibly over into humanity. — Friedrich Schiller