Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives; we of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war.
They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.
Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.
Look back over the past, with it's changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.
Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
To have compassion for those who suffer is a human quality which everyone should possess, especially those who have required comfort themselves in the past and have managed to find it in others. ”
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.
All of the future exists in the past.
A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.
Books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.
Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it.
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.
There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.
If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.
“Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future”
The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.
To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds,
There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.
Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it we do suddenly realize — sometimes with astonishment — how happy we had been.
No, the man said, looking past him with his empty gaze, the realm of the dead isn't anything. But to those who have been there, nothing else is anything either.
The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.
The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
Let no-one say the past is dead, the past is all about us and within.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: its memories are no less revealing than its aims.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now.
Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
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.
Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.
If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
To regret the past, to hope in the future, and never to be satisfied with the present: that is what I spend my whole life doing”
We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine
The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment.
There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.”