Remembrance Of Things Past Quotes & Sayings

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought ... — William Shakespeare

Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past. — Tony Horwitz

I shall quit your vessel on the ice-raft which brought me hither, and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. — Mary Shelley

In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity - and it was an atrocity. — Oliver Stone

Sadly, prosperity is not the only reason people forget God. It can also be hard to remember Him when our lives go badly. When we struggle, as so many do, in grinding poverty or when our enemies prevail against us or when sickness is not healed, the enemy of our souls can send his evil message that there is no God or that if He exists He does not care about us. Then it can be hard for the Holy Ghost to bring to our remembrance the lifetime of blessings the Lord has given us from our infancy and in the midst of our distress.
There is a simple cure for the terrible malady of forgetting God, His blessings, and His messages to us. Jesus Christ promised it to His disciples when He was about to be crucified, resurrected, and then taken away from them to ascend in glory to His Father. They were concerned to know how they would be able to endure when He was no longer with them.
Here is the promise. It was fulfilled for them then. It can be fulfilled for all of us now. — Henry B. Eyring

Consumed by the agony of remembrance The remembrance of night's festive company The one remaining candle flickers and dies. — Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib

Recalling, some time later, what I had felt at the time, I distinguished the impression of having been held for a moment in her mouth, myself, naked, without any of the social attributes which belonged equally to her other playmates and, when she used my surname, to my parents, accessories of which her lips - by the effort she made, a little after her father's manner, to articulate the words to which she wished to give a special emphasis - had the air of stripping, of divesting me, like the skin from a fruit of which one can swallow only the pulp, while her glance, adapting itself to the same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more directly and testified to the consciousness, the pleasure, even the gratitude that it felt by accompanying itself with a smile. — Marcel Proust

To sit down so often with nothing to say,-to say something so often, almost without consciousness of saying and without any remembrance or having said,-is a power of which I will not violate my modesty by boasting; but I do not believe everyone has it. — Michael Kelahan

My life is a tree, yoke fellow of the earth, pledged by roots too deep for remembrance. To stand hard against the storm. To fill my place. (But high in the branches of my green tree there is a wild bird singing. Wing-free are the wings of my bird; she hath built no mortal nest) — Karle Wilson Baker

Scripture says: "Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted." I call on every American family and the family of America to observe a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, honoring the memory of the thousands of victims of these brutal attacks and comforting those who lost loved ones. We will persevere through this national tragedy and personal loss. In time, we will find healing and recovery; and, in the face of all this evil, we remain strong and united, "one Nation under God." — George W. Bush

In the end, what would you gain from everlasting remembrance? Absolutely nothing. So what is left worth living for? This alone: justice in thought, goodness in action, speech that cannot deceive, and a disposition glad of whatever comes, welcoming it as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from the same source and fountain as yourself. — Marcus Aurelius

Most men remember obligations, but are not often likely to be grateful; the proud are made sour by the remembrance and the vain silent. — William Gilmore Simms

There was so much of beauty here: the neat, small tracks of a foraging creature, stoat or marten; the inticate tracery of a skeleton leaf, still clinging vainly to its parent tree as, little by little, time stripped it of its substance, leaving only the delicate remembrance of what it had been. — Juliet Marillier

For me, remembrance of things past has always been a waste of time, and what's the point of tears? I don't know. I've always been focussed on today. Yesterday and tomorrow hold no interest for me. What had to happen, did, and what will happen, will. — Saadat Hasan Manto

So it comes about that the war [World War I] seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war's true subject is remembrance. Indeed the whole war - which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being remembered before they fell - seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as to have been fought retrospectively. — Geoff Dyer

Remembrance of things past. — William Shakespeare

It was cold and barren. It was no longer the view that I remembered. The sunshine of her presence was far from me. The charm of her voice no longer murmured in my ear. — Wilkie Collins

More are men's ends mark'd than their lives before:
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past — William Shakespeare

O my Charlotte, the sacred, tender remembrance! Gracious Heaven! restore to me the happy moment of our first acquaintance.
I smile at the suggestions of my heart, and obey its dictates.
their hearts do not beat in unison
I turned my face away. She should not act thus. She ought not to excite my imagination with such displays of heavenly innocence and happiness, nor awaken my heart from its slumbers, in which it dreams of the worthlessness of life! And why not? Because she knows how much I love her.
I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing.
My dear friend, my energies are all prostrated: she can do with me what she pleases. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Grace and remembrance be to you both. — William Shakespeare

Human beings do terrible things to each other and the tragic thing about it all is the way the remembrance of past hurt can rob us of our future and become the narrative of our lives. — Richard Holloway

30 When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste; Then can I drown an eye (unus'd to flow) For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe, And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight; Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before: But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end. — William Shakespeare

I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It's hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you. — Kellie Elmore

First came a delightful thrill, as of something very pleasant; then a horrible remembrance. — L.M. Montgomery

I told you once before," I said, the words husky from remembrance. "Everyone holds their sins close to their skin."
Fangs gleamed for an instant before Vlad bit into his wrist, pooling up two deep crimson holes.
"Then come," he said, holding it out. "And taste mine. — Jeaniene Frost

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that. — Margaret Atwood

Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles. — Lorrie Moore

It's a funny thing about names, how they become a part of someone. — Lois Lowry

A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art. — Fernando Pessoa

Writing my own diary is the best form of remembrance, but only for my own use. I need these notes; it's like an impulse. — Orhan Pamuk

Mute in that golden silence hung with green,
Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes
Remembrance of all beauty that has been,
And stillness from the pools of Paradise.
— Siegfried Sassoon

Remembrance of our kiss brings not your lips nor mine to mind. The flesh can only envy consumption so divine. — Vanna Bonta

No tongue is able to declare the greatness of the love that Jesus bears to every soul: and therefore this Spouse, when he would leave this earth, in order that his absence might not cause us to forget him, left us as a memorial this Blessed Sacrament, in which he himself remained; for he would not that there should be any other pledge to keep alive our remembrance of him than he himself. — Peter Of Alcantara

Nothing is really lost in the World; everything is preserved. — Joan Ambu

I remember I've never shared tears with someone that longed
for (me) and loved me; I didn't know how to be compassionate.
(The truth, the lies & the love, p. 76) — Chimnese Davids

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts ... .We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need - not all the time, surely, but from time to time - to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember - the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived. — Frederick Buechner

And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid and more abiding than those that come to us in sleep, why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world. — Marcel Proust

Remembrance of things past, I do that all the time. — Bob Dylan

It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past. — Alison Bechdel

Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death. — Albert Camus

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. — Marcel Proust

He remembered a version of himself untrammeled by expectation, unimpeded by Ego. He had suffered in the many years since then, seeking to return to that original self, if, in fact, it ever existed. And yet, he was helpless but to regard that unmistakable fear that gripped him in his dream as a sign that his unevenness lent him now to utter incongruity with this specter of past. — Ashim Shanker

When it seems you are having too much fun, then a switch turns on in your head and makes you think; if only there were a way to take a snapshot of this moment and place it into a mason jar next to some peach preserves. Or, you can just close your eyes and let the joy sink into your psyche. Each, in their own way will last a lifetime." - A.H. Scott 4/29/12 — A.H. Scott

I release ribbons of gratitude to flow back upon the path I have walked as it stretches out behind me, so they brush past everyone whose path crossed my own. May they feel the brief kiss of remembrance within their hearts, there and then gone again, passing like a spring breeze, so that they suddenly know the things they have done for others, in so many ways big and small, seen and unseen alike, somewhere are known and treasured. — Cristen Rodgers

Everything followed its natural course. We gave little thought to past events. Time meant nothing back then. The days came with clouds hanging in the sky filled with cupfuls of dust in the dry seasons, and the sun lasting into the night. It was as if a hand drew hazy pictures in the sky during the rainy seasons, when rain fell in deluges pulsating with spasms of thunderstorms for six uninterrupted months. Because things followed this known and structured pattern, no day was worthy of remembrance. All that mattered was the present and the foreseeable future. — Chigozie Obioma

Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,
Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin ... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to Lawyers,
nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,
her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,
that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,
not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,
rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common. — Thomas Pynchon

[The shells] do not have the meaning they once did, but, as Swann said in Remembrance of Things Past, "even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them." (22) — Anne Fadiman

We believe we are entitled to the gift of the Holy Ghost in extent according to the discretion and wisdom of God and our faithfulness; which gift brings all things to our remembrance, past, present, and to come, that are necessary for us to know, and as far as our minds are prepared to receive the knowledge of God revealed by that all-wise Agent. The Holy Ghost is God's minister, and is delegated to visit the sons and daughters of men. All intelligent beings pertaining to this earth are instructed from the same source. — Brigham Young

We should be remembered for the things we do. The things we do are the most important things of all. They are more important than what we say or what we look like. The things we do outlast our mortality. The things we do are like monuments that people build to honour heroes after they've died. They're like the pyramids that the Egyptians built to honour the Pharaohs. Only instead of being made out of stone, they're made out of the memories people have of you. That's why your deeds are like your monuments. Built with memories instead of with stone. — R.J. Palacio

With the compelling convincingness of dreams, which are vague yet exact, the ghost voice draws us (to ourselves and all of our component selves), lifts them casually out of the well of the past
the well wherein nothing is lost, the deep well of forgetfulness, and remembrance
and tosses them mockingly on the glassy table surface of our consciousness. There we are forced to consider them. There we are forced to regard, analyze, and re-understand. — Heinrich Robert Zimmer

In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred,It is a paryer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present. — Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

There is nothing earthly that lasts so well, as money. A man's learning dies with him, as does his virtues fade out of remembrance, but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live and keep his memory green. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Our memories and the events of our lives are untidy things. We wish that we could file them away and shut the door, or we wish the opposite - that they would stay with us forever. You want to banish the remembrance of a tight hold on your ankle, a rope under a bed, the amber-colored medicine bottles of your father, the door your mother slams after a night of too much wine and jealousy. You want to keep close to you always that first sweet kiss, a maple leaf, that growing sense of yourself; you want to hold the sight of your dying father on that last boat trip, the calm you remember as your mother held you. Her voice. — Deb Caletti

Lay these Bones in an unworthy Urn,
Tombless, with no Remembrance over them. — William Shakespeare

At the same distance from it is the city of Sala, situate on a river which bears the same name, a place which stands upon the very verge of the desert, and though infested by troops of elephants, is much more exposed to the attacks of the nation of the Autololes, through whose country lies the road to Mount Atlas, the most fabulous locality even in Africa.
[ ... ] There formerly existed some Commentaries written by Hanno, a Carthaginian general, who was commanded, in the most flourishing times of the Punic state, to explore the sea-coast of Africa. The greater part of the Greek and Roman writers have followed him, and have related, among other fabulous stories, that many cities there were founded by him, of which no remembrance, nor yet the slightest vestige, now exists. [V,1] — Pliny The Elder

Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope. — George Eliot

There's no use in weeping,
Though we are condemned to part:
There's such a thing as keeping,
A remembrance in one's heart ... — Charlotte Bronte

I grew up in those years when the Old West was passing and the New West was emerging. It was a time when we still heard echoes and already saw shadows, on moonlit nights when the coyotes yapped on the hilltops, and on hot summer afternoons when mirages shimmered, dust devils spun across the flats, and towering cumulus clouds sailed like galleons across the vast blueness of the sky. Echoes of remembrance of what men once did there, and visions of what they would do together. — Hal Borland

Idleness never always means not doing anything at all, for everybody does something each moment of time! It is however also wasting our true, relevant and purposeful time on less purposeful things such that in the end, we only come to a remembrance of not just the true purposeful time we could have used, but also the true and real life we could have lived to leave distinctive footprints with the time we had! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

And what I said was I'll miss you,
What I meant to say was that I love you,
What I wanted to say was that I meant what I said
I miss you like I miss my own bed
after too many nights of sleeping on couches
or hardwood floors
Or sitting silently behind the doors
Of hotel rooms became wounds
Breathing life in to this loneliness
I miss you
Like a burn victim must miss their own skin
I miss you like a sad ending
Must miss someplace new to begin
Because some say that the highway becomes a flat line
if you travel it for too long
I can't tell if that's true or false,
But I'm racing down it towards you trying to find my
Pulse. — Shane Koyczan

They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance. — Zora Neale Hurston

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. — William Shakespeare

In this world, is the destiny of mankind controlled by some transcendental entity or law? Is it like the hand of God hovering above? At least it is true that man has no control, even over his own will. Man takes up the sword in order to shield the small wound in his heart sustained in a far-off time beyond remembrance. Man wields the sword so that he may die smiling in some far-off time beyond perception. — Kentaro Miura

Anything could happen here and who would know? It was a new place to me, but timeless in its own right. Regn had never stood here. All these years since and we'd been so close to 'this' obscurity. Its hidden proximity is what disquieted. — Wheston Chancellor Grove

I dragged myself to my feet, and with my hellhound in tow started off once more through the fastness of the wood, feeling, as the poet did before me, that my companion would be with me through the nights and through the days and down the arches of the years, and I should never be rid of him. — Daphne Du Maurier

We wear our lives
Like costumes
Use bills and coins like props
In an over budget production
That we cannot seem to stop
So it just goes on like this
As if we accept this
As if we've all become
Buddhas of mass production
Our brains rotting
Like teeth
Under the sweet
Unending bliss of false enlightenment. — Shane Koyczan

To some extent, I have only lived to have something to outlive. By confiding these futile remembrances to paper, I am conscious of accomplishing the most important act of my life. I was predestined to Memory. — Oscar Milosz

Open thy mind; take in what I explain and keep it there; because to understand is not to know, if thou dost not retain... — Dante Alighieri

It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory — Paulo Coelho

The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify by their own lonesome familiarities to this feeling. Ecstasy, even , I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass. — Jack Kerouac

People will know you for who you are, but will remember you for what you have done. True leaders make long lasting impacts! — Israelmore Ayivor

Then, were not summer's distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet. — William Shakespeare

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. — Laurence Binyon

All remembrance of things past is fiction. — Ernest Hemingway,

Let us chide ourselves for past forgetfulness, and pray for grace ever to bear Him in fondest remembrance. Lord, paint upon the eyeballs of my soul the image of Thy Son. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Many species of wit are quite mechanical; these are the favorites of witlings, whose fame in words scarce outlives the remembrance of their funeral ceremonies. — Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

Never, I say, had a country so many openings to happiness as this ... Her cause was good. Her principles just and liberal. Her temper serene and firm ... The remembrance then of what is past, if it operates rightly must inspire her with the most laudable of an ambition, that of adding to the fair fame she began with. The world has seen her great adversity ... Let then, the world see that she can bear prosperity; and that her honest virtue in time of peace is equal to the bravest virtue in time of war. — Thomas Paine

Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit. — Upton Sinclair

A day doesn't go by when I don't look at them, she said. I can't have them up on the kitchen refrigerator or in a frame in the bedroom
I just can't do it, I just can't run into them casually when I'm supposed to be doing something else
but I also can't last a day without seeing them. Visiting with them when I am alone in the house. — Chris Bohjalian

Not only did secular scientists rout the Christian fundamentalists, they placed themselves in the posture of knowing more, on the basis of their own very short-term investigations, than the collective remembrances of the rest of humankind. — Vine Deloria Jr.

I am I and you are you, whatever we were to each other that we still are. — Henry Scott Holland

If I'm not around
I hope you'll remember me
and together we will hold on to our favorite song. — Sanober Khan

Keep the remembrance of your real nature alive, even while working, and avoid haste which causes you to forget. Be deliberate. Practice meditation to still the mind and cause it to become aware of its true relationship to the Self which supports it. Do not imagine that it is you who are doing the work. Think that is the underlying current which is doing it. Identify yourself with the current. — Ramana Maharshi