Elizabeth Barrett Browning Quotes

Time is the wisest counselor of all.

There's something about being around a long time that puts stuff in perspective.

I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

Life must be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

The years teach much which the days never know.

What separates old from the young is experience and patience.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

The meaning of today will not be clear until tomorrow.

Youth looks forward, for nothing is behind! Age backward, for nothing is before.

As I am becoming older, the only thing that speeds up is time.

The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

I look back and think of all the times I've had to let things go in the past, and how traumatic it seemed while it was happening, but how my understanding of it changed as time passed - and oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term. So I remind myself of that.

There was confusion since I stood here 35 years ago.

I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. And there is not much percentage in the future.

The past isn't useful until its place in the present is found.

History is our guide, and without a knowledge of history, we are lost!

While in a vintage restaurant..."the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

The years don't always add wisdom, but they do add perspective.

Again, if you only know what you know, you don't know if something's good or bad. You don't have perspective.

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.