G. M. Trevelyan Quotes

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

The past is made out of facts...I guess the future is just hope.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

Nobody ever lived in the past.

History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

The good old days are neither better nor worse than the ones we're living through right now.

The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

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

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead.

Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

We are tomorrow's past.

The future is no more uncertain than the present.

We can neither ignore the history of the past nor create the future.

There’s a big difference between history and the future.

I only remember the future.