Past The Point Quotes & Sayings

This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for the future is offset by the "ability" to dread pain and to fear of the unknown. Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and future gives us a corresponding dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable. — Alan W. Watts

You should never fall in love with your own press clippings, because it is very much the nature of the beast that the same journalists who build you up between Monday and Friday tear you down for weekend fun ... My family's habit of living in the past seems to me pathological, even dangerous. If all greatness lies in the past, what is the point of the future? — Stephen L. Carter

The past has no power over us. It doesn't matter how long we have had a negative pattern. The point of power is in the present moment. What a wonderful thing to realize! We can begin to be free in this moment! — Louise L. Hay

Out of the brown mouth into a slanted easterly rain they head south along the shore, pushed toward it on a light chop, all but the pilot huddling under plastic sheeting that covers lumber, nails, window casings and plantains - the women sharing a seat, Reese behind them and the boatman behind him in a narrow-running balance. The land retreats as the dory crosses a wide bight toward the next point, rising and dropping on larger waves while a seaside village of thatch and palm passes thin and blurry in the drizzled distance. Two miles later another village appears, much the same but longer along the curve and then, past the point, the coast is tangled in mangrove, grass and sea grape. The passengers peer out of the plastic at a rain-erased horizon as the dory slices and slows in equal measure and the boatman bails with a cut jug the rolling puddle at his feet. — Michael Jarvis

But as those who do hold Trump to the standards of any other person have found out on Twitter and other social media outlets these Trump followers are a nasty fascistic lot. Dowd is lucky he didn't get death threats like Kurt Eichenwald. Or maybe he did and refuses to acknowledge them. If you voted for Trump and continue to support him and you think you are better than these bigoted virulent trolls, you're not. Your silence enables them just as it did in the racist campaign that Trump and Bannon ran. In fact, hiding behind a civilized veneer in your support of fascism I consider more dangerous. We're past describing you as collaborators at this point. That lets you off the hook. You're Russo-American oligarchical theocratic fascists. — Kevin Sessums

There is a level when your heart breaks past the point of repair. When it shatters into pieces that cannot be glued back together. — Alessandra Torre

A lot of people feel like they're victims in life, and they'll often point to past events, perhaps growing up with an abusive parent or in a dysfunctional family. Most psychologists believe that about 85 percent of families are dysfunctional, so all of a sudden you're not so unique. My parents were alcoholics. My dad abused me. My mother divorced him when I was six ... I mean, that's almost everybody's story in some form or not. The real question is, what are you going to do now? What do you choose now? Because you can either keep focusing on that, or you can focus on what you want. And when people start focusing on what they want, what they don't want falls away, and what they want expands, and the other part disappears. (Jack Canfield) — Rhonda Byrne

Well for everyone to make a study of astrology for, as indicated, while many individuals have set about to prove the astrological aspects and astrological survey enable one to determine future as well as the past conditions, these are well to the point where the individual understands that these act upon individuals because of their sojourn or correlation of their associations with the environs through which these are shown-see? Rather than the star directing the life, the life of the individual directs the courses of the stars, see? ... — Edgar Cayce

Jeremy Beaumont-Jones had been lucky enough to be born rich. He wasn't in the mad oligarch class but once you're past a certain point, the sheer weight of your money sucks in wealth like a financial singularity. If you're sensible enough not to blow it on race horses, cocaine or musical theatre, then it becomes a perpetual-motion money making machine. — Ben Aaronovitch

He chuckled. "Be focused. Direct all your thoughts to one point. Let the prayers take effect. Let them change you into a new person, Tamar. Just like Moses, after forty days of talking to God on Sinai, became a new being." The tabby crept past and squeezed between his legs. — Ruchama King Feuerman

I'm not the first one to point out that George Lucas used plastic helmets to cover the faces of the storm troopers in Star Wars, in order to make them more inhuman, as their eyes and faces were not visible. In our times, we are getting a more modern version of Lucas's Stormtroopers, thanks to the popular nerve toxin Botox. This is something more and more people who are past their middle age are happily injecting into themselves - more specifically, into their faces. Botox causes local paralysis (it is a nerve toxin, after all), which smoothes out wrinkles. Unfortunately, it also means you can no longer use some of your facial muscles, as you are paralyzed. This means you're not only getting the skin of a Barbie doll, you're getting its range of facial expressions too. — Henrik Fexeus

Thinking about the way you remembered your past. What you remembered, she said, was a string of events and years stretching back from the point where you now found yourself. In other words, a line of time. This might be coloured differently, depending upon what had happened to you. For example, if you had lost someone then it would be black. Other spots might be lighter. On some sections of the line time would have passed quickly, on other sections more slowly. But, for a long way back, it would still be a line. — Peter Hoeg

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Part of the job of adults was to set limits. But the last rule, the unspoken rule of any story or journey, is that all limits are suspect. All warnings show only the point where the last story stopped, the boundary past which the map is unmapped. The Kingdom of Here There Be Dragons is the province of explorers, magicians, and kids. — Bob Proehl

People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
...
She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort. — Wallace Stegner

We're putting 70 million tonnes of pollution into the atmosphere every day, trapping an enormous amount of extra heat from the sun inside the earth's atmosphere. It's threatening to push the planet past a tipping point beyond which climate change would be difficult to stop — Al Gore

He wanted to hide by shrinking past zero, through the dot at the end of himself, to a negative size, into an otherworld, where he would find a place - in an enormous city, too large to know itself, or some slowly developing suburb - to be alone and carefully build a life in which he might be able to begin, at some point, to think about what to do about himself. — Tao Lin

Over the past decade, the anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teenagers that smoking isn't cool. But that's not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool. Smoking epidemics begin in precisely the same way that the suicide epidemic in Micronesia began or word-of-mouth epidemics begin or the AIDS epidemic began, because of the extraordinary influence of Pam P. and Billy G. and Maggie and their equivalents-the smoking versions of R. and Tom Gau and Gaetan Dugas. In this epidemic, as in all others, a very small group-a select few-are responsible for driving the epidemic forward. — Malcolm Gladwell

He gets away with it because he's strong.'
'This is the story of mankind.'
'I thought you were going to be a priest at one point.'
'Yes. But then I read the newspaper. — Christopher Buehlman

Man's inhumanity to man is as old as humanity itself. Some people just do evil things. Most do not. A billion people have seen 'Batman' movies over the past 20 years, and they have been entertained and inspired. One man saw it as a sick entry point for mass murder. The one is tragic. The billion are not. I choose to write for the billion. — Kurt Sutter

The nihilist makes one mistake: he does not realise that other people are also nihilists, and that the nihilism of other people is now an active historical factor. He has no consciousness of the possibility of transcendence. The fact is, however, that the present reign of survival, in which all the talk about progress expresses nothing so much as the fear that progress may be impossible, is itself a product of history, is itself the outcome of all the renunciations of humanity that have been made over the centuries. Indeed, the history of survival is the historical movement which will eventually undo history itself. For clear awareness of just how nightmarish life has become is on the point of fusing with a consciousness of the successive renunciations of the past, and thus too with the real desire to pick up the movement of transcendence everywhere in space and time where it has been prematurely interrupted. — Raoul Vaneigem

For, I think, when I woke up today, with a dream of yesterday still in my eyes,I felt tired in life. And thinking of the little blond girl of Mays & Junes long gone by,I felt strange looking on a field of wheat, and I thought, in a moment I was God and so was she, and this field was us too. So long gone, she goes. But I am still her, whether she comes and goes like all of life, or she stays awhile.
Once, a man of physics told me, matter cannot be created or destroyed. And on
another occasion he said everything came from one point, in the beginning.
So we are all flowers and rivers and trees. That was all of us together. Every one of the past, present, and future. — Derek Keck

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

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

As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point? — Dani Shapiro

Truth is like the moon in the sky. Words are like a finger. A finger can point to the moon's location, but it is not the moon. To see the moon, you must look past the finger. To look for the truth in books, the Sixth Patriarch was saying, is like mistaking the finger for the moon. The moon and the finger are not the same thing.
"Not same," old Jiko would have said. "Not different, either. — Ruth Ozeki

No past and no future. Save for the fireworker himself, no one ever knows the grand finale is the grand finale until it's over. And at that point, wherever one is, one won't ever really have been anywhere else. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Apparently, for some reason known only to themselves, these people ... have chosen to cling to hydrocarbon-fueled power generation well past the point at which they could have replaced it with nuclear generation. — David Weber

We need to get past the point where being black and a male means that I am likely to mug you for your wallet, likely to have a minus 15 on my IQ, likely to not go to college and likely to wear my pants below my arse. — John Amaechi

I wanted to own her past, her present, her future. I wanted to be her first and last and fucking forever. I wanted to wipe everything from her life where I wasn't the center point of her evolution. — Pepper Winters

The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all. — Wendell Berry

I know this sounds like quite a pile. I know, too, that some of you will wonder why I don't just buy a Kindle. I see your point, but the trouble is that to do so would be to forgo the pleasure of the moment when, years in the future, sand falls from the pages of an old book, and you suddenly remember the Isle of Wight and A Passage to India, a Greek island and The Map of Love, or whatever. For me, a ghostly trace of Ambre Solaire rising from the pages of a sun-bleached paperback is a way back to the past: to favourite stories as much as to favourite beaches. — Rachel Cooke

This isn't a matter for the eyes, it is a matter for the heart. Many signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people. I trust this is so. It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons deprived of memory, they become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going. So a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future. When I'm depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity, the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

We may now have reached a point where this gap in our make-up has become unsustainable; partly because what in the past would have counted as material plenty has become the norm for the majority in much of the world; and partly because the slow retreat of religion that coincided with the spread of a capitalist economy has left a gaping hole in millions of people's lives. (Geoff Mulgan) — Dalai Lama XIV

Delarosa was trying to save the human race," said Mkele. "Her only crime was that she was willing to go too far in order to do it. We decided, briefly, that we didn't want to go along with her, but look at us: We're hiding in a basement, letting Delarosa fight our battles, seriously considering lettering her deploy a nuclear bomb. We are long past the point where we can pick and choose our morality. We either save our species or we don't."
"Yes," said Tovar, "but I'd prefer it if we were still worth saving by the end of it. — Dan Wells

Gower is the first English writer to use "history" as an English word. He regularly rhymes the term with "memory," for to his way of thinking history and memory are correlative. That is, without history, there can be no memory; and without memory, there can be no history. But the point of historical knowledge is not to enable people to live in the past, or even to understand the past in the way we would expect a modern historian to proceed; rather, it is to enable people to live more vitally in the present. — Russell A. Peck

When I was little, I loved running in the rain. There was something almost freeing about it. The exhilaration of your blood pumping, the quick shallow breaths, and the way the wind brushes past your body. Want to know my most favorite part? That unstoppable feeling from pushing myself to the breaking point gets me every time. Now though? Well ... it's complicated. — Amy Lunderman

Memories are peculiar...You think the past is there, all fixed and stable, but it is really chock full of surprises and endlessly susceptible to change...So maybe it is true that we are constantly rewriting our past; they are not something fixed and unchangeable for all time. There is a basic structure, of course, a canvas stretched across boards, which cannot be remodeled at will, but the surface of that canvas can be shaded, rearranged, touched up, continually worked on to correspond to the needs of the present. In fact, the present moment is largely the focal point from which you shape the direction of your future and juggle the implications of your past. — Elizabeth Arthur

I pushed his hair away from his eyes and took a closer look at his cheek. Maybe there really had been a boy in the street, but I also wouldn't put it past Cole to make one appear,if he had that power.
Jack's eyes opened fully,and he looked at me with half a grin. "You remember the first time I told you I loved you?" His words slurred together.
"Shhhhh.Don't talk.The paramedics are on their way."
"Do you?"
I touched his cheek and he winced. I could almost taste his pain,as if it were a tangible element in the air.I could feel my body hungering for the hurt.It was the first time since I'd Returned that I craved someone else's energy.Even at my lowest point,those last moments in the Everneath,I'd never felt a need for it.Until now.Until I was faced with emotions this strong.
He tilted his head toward me,and I jerked back. The taste in the air became bitter and sweet,a mixture of pain and longing.
"Tell me you remember," he said. "Please. — Brodi Ashton

(Plants on the disc, while including the categories known commonly as annuals, which were sown this year to come up later this year, biennials, sown this year to grow next year, and perennials, sown this year to grow until further notice, also included a few rare re-annuals which, because of an unusual four-dimensional twist in their genes, could be planted this year to come up last year. The vul nut vine was particularly exceptional in that it could flourish as many as eight years prior to its seed actually being sown. Vul nut wine was reputed to give certain drinkers an insight into the future which was, from the nut's point of view, the past. Strange but true.) — Terry Pratchett

The physical universe was created when Oneness became duality, and we can see this duality, this yin and yang, everywhere in the universe, in every atom, every action, and in every function of the human body. Yin and yang are manifest everywhere, except at the very center of being, the perfect point of balance, at that infinite moment where the future becomes the past. — Robert Tisserand

At some point on your road you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself. Or the past will pursue you, and bite the nape of your neck, leave you bleeding in the ditch. Better to turn and face it with such weapons as you possess. — Hilary Mantel

In 1992, teachers all over the country, by the thousands, were beginning to teach the Columbus story in new ways, to recognize that to Native Americans, Columbus and his men were not heroes, but marauders. The point being not just to revise our view of past events, but to be provoked to think about today. — Howard Zinn

Generally speaking, I am not interested in the future and don't believe in it. First, I guess it is true that I don't trust the future, but, more to the point, I don't even trust the "myself" of tomorrow, nor, for that matter, of the day after. Basically, all I know, and all I am capable of understanding, is the "me" that is here, now, the "me" that has dragged his past with him to this point. — Yohji Yamamoto

At some point in the past, it was decided that women in comedy are never supposed to be shown in an unflattering light. But in comedy, you need all of your tools to be funny. — Melissa McCarthy

Dear Dr. Ortiz - Congratulations on your discovery! We found the object, too, about six months ago and have been studying it in detail for the past few months. It has a few interesting properties that you might find interesting. Most interestingly, it has a satellite, and the orbital solution gives a system mass of about 28% of that of the Pluto-Charon system. It's still probably the biggest KBO around but it has a sufficiently high albedo that it is not quite as big or massive as Pluto. I've got a paper describing the satellite that, ironically, I was planning to submit tomorrow. I will forward the paper to you as I submit it. I am sure that I will get inquiries about your new object from different people; is there [or is there going to be] a website describing your survey or your discovery that I can point people to? Again, congratulations on a very nice discovery! — Mike Brown

The dreamlike, bombastic wish to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made me who I am now ... To sit once more on the warm moss and hold the cap - it's the absurd wish to go back behind myself in time and take myself - the only marked by events - along on this journey. — Pascal Mercier

It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges. — Lauren Groff

I have come more and more to the belief that we owe our arts a thousand times what we are paying them. We support our cigarette factories, soap manufacturers, beauticians, all the luxury and pleasure businesses of our over-indulged civilization, but we pay our painters an average wage ... and yet when the future digs us from the past they won't care how we smell, what we smoke, or if we bathed. All they'll know of us will be our architecture, our paintings, sculpture, poems, laws, philosophy, drama, our pottery and fabrics, the things which our hands made and our minds thought up - oh, the machines they'll dig up too, but perhaps they'll point to them as our destruction, the wheels that drove us down to death. — Vincent Price

The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

But my point is these Civil War songs were gruesome. The hatred that's so bad in this country today, and for the past 10 or 15 years, bad as it is, is nothing compared to the kind of things people would write down and sing back in the Civil War. — T Bone Burnett

That's crazy," Gabriel said. "We must be seventy million years in the past."
"Nearly a hundred and twenty-five million," Ohin said. "It seems far, but time is really interrelational. Every moment is just as far from every other.
"Right," Gabriel said. "Of course. That makes perfect sense." Sema was right. He was at a breaking point. And he broke right past it. His eyes rolled up in his head and he passed out, falling back into the mattress of the bed. — G.L. Breedon

It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time - for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men's affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. Do — C.S. Lewis

Chasing your tale? Sometimes we relive past accomplishments, failures and or past relationships to the point of exhaustion. When we do this, I liken it to a dog chasing its tail, just spinning round and round and going nowhere fast. Constantly chasing our own tales has the same effect on us. It leaves us in a state of dizzying immobility. When we wrap our arms so firmly around our past we leave little room to embrace our present future and that, my friends, is a sad tale to tell. ~Jason Versey — Jason Versey

Because - truth? - on the scale of significance, that stuff doesn't even register.
What has me pushed past the boiling point ... what has me really, really upset is learning the woman I thought was so incredibly strong I married her on the spot ... is actually
a quitter who runs from challenge,
a coward too afraid to even try,
a liar who makes promises she won't keep and
a cynic too bitter to believe what's right in front of her face. Is that real enough for you? — Mira Lyn Kelly

The present is the transition point between the past and future and flows like a river moving towards the ocean of one's life. One who lives in the present is neither burdened by the weight of the past nor troubled by foreseen events in the future. One who lives in the present is open to all experiences --the gentle sound of the wind rustling in the leaves, the blazing sight of the setting sun, the light touch of a spring rain, the fresh smell of green grass, the salty taste of ocean spray. The present is the past and future rolled into one. The present is here. The present is now. — Francis Fesmire

The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting - fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that's it for you. — Bill Bryson

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting. — Margaret Atwood

It's no good protecting people or even looking after them past a certain point. One can't grasp more than a piece of anyone. Most of the rest can only be protected by themselves and the remainder by hired specialists and doctors and dentists and professional protectors. — Ian Fleming

The point of freewriting is to get past the voice inside your head that tells you your ideas aren't good enough, your words aren't good enough, you're no writer and so forth. — M. Molly Backes

I've always had to train harder than others to get the oxygen to my muscles because of my lung capacity. I have to push myself past the point of being comfortable. — Charlie White

If you are trying to bring about a better future, you must eery day go someplace you have not been before, to the point of no return. What happens every time you go to the point of no return? You push past your limits and open up new terrains of possibility. Each challenge accepted leads to greater ability when you confront the next. — Dov Seidman

The neurotic youth of to-day renews no ante-existent type. You will look in vain for a face like Amos's amongst the busts of the recovered past. The same weakness of outline you may point to - the sheep-like features falling to a blunt prow; the lax jaw and pinched temples - but not to that which expresses a consciousness that combative effort in a world of fruitless results is a lost desire.
("The Accursed Cordonnier") — Bernard Capes

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION How much work did you do today that you will be proud of tomorrow? I don't mean just how you handled the big things, but also how you addressed the little, seemingly insignificant ones. Did you make progress on what matters most to you, or did you allow the buzz, busyness, and expectations of others to squelch your passion and focus? I've been asking these questions of others and myself each day for more than a decade, and they are the main reason I originally felt compelled to write Die Empty. Through my work I've encountered many teams of brilliant, sharp, amazing, talented people who have at some point "settled in" or begun coasting on past success. Unfortunately, — Todd Henry

I realize at one point, that I was being followed, and then I began to see the surveillance that was going past the road on my house. And so, these cars began to surveil me. People began to follow me around, and it did, it was very disrupting to think that your privacy was being violated, and for no reason that I could come up with. — Gloria Naylor

By the end of the 20th century, "liberals" had again discredited themselves, to the point where they went back to calling themselves "progressives" to escape their past, much as people do when they declare bankruptcy. — Thomas Sowell

If Jesus Christ was who He claimed to be, and He did die on a cross at a point of time in history, then, for all history past and all history future it is relevant because that is the very focal point for forgiveness and redemption. — Josh McDowell

At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past. — Haruki Murakami

If existing management want to keep their jobs when the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, they must adopt an outsider's intellectual objectivity. They must do what they need to do to get through the strategic inflection point unfettered by any emotional attachment to the past. That's what Gordon and I had to do when we figuratively went out the door, stomped out our cigarettes and returned to do the job. — Andrew S. Grove

All great fighting is the same, Eragon, even as all great warriors are the same. Past a certain point, it does not matter whether you wield a sword, a claw, a tooth or a tail. It is true, you must be capable with your weapon, but anyone with the time, and the inclination can acquire technical proficiency. To achieve greatness, though, that requires artistry. That requires imagination and thoughtfulness, and it is those qualities that the best warriors share, even if, on the surface, they appear completely different. — Christopher Paolini

My point is that focusing on the past, present or future can have both positive and negative effects. Excessive worry about the future can be bad, while hopes and dreams can be good. Regret because of the past can be destructive, but learning lessons from previous events and having good memories can be great. Focusing intently on the present is usually stress-relieving and liberating, but sometimes the present moment is too sad or horrible to dwell on. — Gudjon Bergmann

The past sharpens perspective, warns against pitfalls, and helps to point the way. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. — George Orwell

In the past, I used to argue with those who didn't share my views. I felt this incredible need to 'make my point.' Now I live my life and do my best to be an example of what seems right to me. — Victoria Moran

When you've moved past a point where you're just scrambling for jobs, you think about the things that you want to do. And the things that you want to do are governed by what you've seen, what you choose to embrace. — Danny Glover

My point is, or should be, simple: history happened. The object is not to undo it, distort it, or to make it fit our present political attitudes. The object of history, which each generation properly interprets anew, is to understand what happened and why. A multicultural Canada can and should look at its past with fresh eyes. It should, for example, study how the Ukrainians came to Canada, how they were treated, how they lived, sometimes suffered, ultimately prospered, and became Canadians. What historians should not do is to recreate history to make it serve present purposes. They should not obscure or reshape events to make them fit political agendas. They should not declare whole areas of the past off-limits because they can only be presented in politically unfashionable terms any more than they should fail to draw object lessons from a past that was frequently less than pleasant and less than honourable. Because the past was not perfect, it must not be made perfect today. — J.L. Granatstein

All the things and events we usually consider as irreconcilable, such as cause and effect, past and future, subject and object, are actually just like the crest and trough of a single wave, a single vibration. For a wave, although itself a single event, only expresses itself through the opposites of crest and trough, high point and low point. For that very reason, the reality is not found in the crest nor the trough alone, but in their unity ... — Ken Wilber

Look, this island is an attempt to re-create a natural environment from the past. To make an isolated world where extinct creatures roam freely. Correct?" "Yes." "But from my point of view, such an undertaking is impossible. The mathematics are so self-evident that they don't need to be calculated. It's rather like my asking you whether, on a billion dollars in income, you had to pay tax. You wouldn't need to pull out your calculator to check. You'd know tax was owed. And, similarly, I know overwhelmingly that one cannot successfully duplicate nature in this way, or hope to isolate it. — Michael Crichton

The past cannot be redeamed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is.
To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the present and promises to be with us in the future until the end point. Only time conquers time and its burdens. There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need. — Dean Koontz

My simple point is that I judge a person's faith by how they live their life, not by the tenets of their religion. I've watched the holiest of people walk past somebody in need or treat their staff mean. To me, the beauty of faith is only seen when people live it consistently or struggle to do so. — Cory Booker

Read good writing, and don't live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it's not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches. — Rebecca Solnit

People no longer need to go to church to hear the Word, which has been the selling point for local churches for the past fifty years. Because of this, church is becoming less of a possessor of knowledge (commodity) and more a communal hub. — Justin Wise

Somewhere along the line, between the idealisms of youth and the realities of adulthood, we become pacified by our jobs; we tolerate how we hurt the world so that we can sustain our lives. At some point, blurred in the past, we traded the greater good for ourselves. — Richard Beckham II

Those who have accepted the facts of my life often find me admirable for surviving, even thriving, in spite of it all. You might think I would find that comforting, but I never have. It creates, or emphasizes, the distance between us. They see triumph over past obstacles, whereas I experience the continuing vulnerability of walking a tightrope. There is no point of completion, no sigh of relief, no victory dance in the end zone. — Marla Handy

The success that comes from my books is not something I feel very comfortable with. Past a certain point you have to accept the idea that the success is a lot to do with the timing and luck and that divorces you from it massively. There are aspects of it that I haven't got used to at all. But I've enjoyed some parts of it massively. It relates to the same reason I did a lot of backpacking - partly for the experience - it's something to tell my grandkids. It's a weird chain of events to have in your life. — Alex Garland

He was a stranger here. The people who might remember him would certainly not welcome him. His old gang had cast him out, along with all of the former friends and parents. The suburban landscape of hypocrisy, so hated in his youth, beheld again and with it, old feelings that motivated him through life more than he would ever admit. Every turning point in life, already decided by all the events here — Jaime Allison Parker

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Locating a past event in measured time was something they could do with great effort, as a special favor, but Peter could tell they didn't see the point. Why should it matter exactly how many days, weeks, months or years ago a relative had died? A person was either living amongst them or in the ground. — Michel Faber

If there is anything certain in life, it is this. Time doesn't always heal. Not really. I know they say it does, but that is not true. What time does is to trick you into believing that you have healed, that the hurt of a great loss has lessened. But a single word, a note of a song, a fragrance, a knife point of dawn light across an empty room, any one of these things will take you back to that one moment you have never truly forgotten. These small things are the agents of memory. They are the sharp needle points piercing the living fabric of your life.

Life, my children, isn't linear where the heart is concerned. It is filled with invisible threads that reach out from your past and into your future. These threads connect every second we have lived and breathed. As your own lives move forward and as the decades pass, the more of these threads are cast. Your task is to weave them into a tapestry, one that tells the story of the time we shared. — Stephen Lee

Most immigrants agree that at some point, we become permanent foreigners, belonging neither here nor there. Many tomes have been written trying to describe this feeling of floating between worlds but never fully landing. Artists, using every known medium from words to film to Popsicle sticks, have attempted to encapsulate the struggle of trying to hang on to the solid ground of our mother culture and realizing that we are merely in a pond balancing on a lily pad with a big kid about to belly-flop right in. If and when we fall into this pond, will we be singularly American or will we hyphenate? Can we hold on to anything or does our past just end up at the bottom of the pond, waiting to be discovered by future generations? — Firoozeh Dumas

Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simmple, sel-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future. — Dean Koontz

I always get involved with the environment because once you go past the tipping point with the environment, you don't get it back. — Chris Noth

Why are there more male hyperpolyglots? One answer is that speaking a lot of languages is a geek macho thing (...) It seemed that a woman is less likely to say she "speaks" or "knows" a language if she studied it at some point in the past, while a man, wanting to display his giant repertoire, would include it. — Michael Erard

To whoever will listen.

I've been thinking about black holes a lot. How their gravity is so strong it bends time and space. How you'd be stretched down to atoms passing the event horizon.

I kind of feel like I'm being stretched to atoms. Like I'm falling apart and becoming so metaphorically thin that I'm transparent. But, as nothing that happens past the event horizon affects the universe outside of it, nothing that I'm feeling is affecting anyone in the outside world, either.

The event horizon is a point of no return. Nothing, not even light, can escape it.

I wonder what will happen when I pass the event horizon and fully submerge myself into the black hole.

There are theories that if you enter a blackhole under a specific angle, you'll survive and hit the bottom of it. The chances are incredibily small.

I doubt I'll survive. — Emily Trunko

At some point, most of us stop living out of imagination and start living out of memory. Instead of creating the future, we start repeating the past. Instead of living by faith, we live by logic. Instead of going after our dreams, we stop circling Jericho. But it doesn't have to be that way. — Mark Batterson

Life in Christ is not meant to mirror life in a Greco-Roman culture. An ancient Middle Eastern culture is not our standard. We are not meant to adopt the world of Luther's Reformation or the culture of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening or even 1950s America as our standard for righteousness. The culture, past or present, isn't the point: Jesus and his Kingdom come, his will done, right now - that is the point. — Sarah Bessey

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it. — Adolf Loos

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

Donna learned quickly that there's no point in beating yourself up when you screw up or fail to follow through. Guilt trips and self-criticism don't motivate you to make meaningful changes; they just keep you stuck, dwelling on the past. So after each relapse, Donna came back to the basic ACT formula: A = Accept your thoughts and feelings and be present. C = Connect with your values. T = Take effective action. — Russ Harris

At 32, I kind of thought I was past the point where I was gonna get a break that really changed my life overnight. — Allison Tolman