Charles Williams Quotes

Our goal is to move forward, but we know that to avoid falling backward, we must be willing to look backward and to come to terms with what happened in the past.

Sometimes, to move into the future, you must go back the past.

Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future - that's fabulous.

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

You've got to always go back in time if you want to move forward.

Think about the past to learn, but move forward.

I think it's a very healthy thing to learn from what's happened in the past. But only if you look at what happened and think, 'How could I have dealt with that differently?' Then let it go.

You learn from your mistakes, or you go backward. I'm the kind of person who wants to move forward.

I'm the last person to ask 'what do you remember' from a particular time period... I like to learn from the past... not 'live' in it.

That's a part of me going back to what I used to do.

You can't start changing things in your past. Everyone has challenges and lessons to learn - we wouldn't be who we are without them. I certainly wouldn't be who I am.

Although, I think you look back and you try to learn from your mistakes.

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

No graduation speaker will ever tell you that the future is anything but uncertain. It never is. But graduations need not only be obsessed with looking ahead; a graduation can be a day on which we turn back and trace our steps to see how we ended up where we are.

We have all examined our past critically and are very much aware of even the unpleasant things. Now, we need to look at what we plan to do with the lessons we have learned from the past.

It's like climbing a staircase. I'm on the top of the staircase, I look behind me and I see the steps. That's where I was.

Life moves fast. As much as you can learn from your history, you have to move forward.

You can't undo the past... but you can certainly not repeat it.

I love stories, and as I got older, I realized how important what happened yesterday is to how you try to make your present better.

We are products of the past and its useful to remember that as we move into the future.

We have to go into the past to go further and further into the future.

If one does not forget one's previous experience, one can learn for the future from the past.

We cannot undo the past but we can learn from it, and we cannot predict the future but we can shape and build it.

We ought not to look back, unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience.