Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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

The only danger of knowing and thinking a lot about history, is that you will trip on something behind you. Be sure you also look ahead.

Pessimism is a very easy way out because it is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today, you can't help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of mankind.

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

Everyone has got to realise you can't hold onto the past if you want any future. Each second should lead to the next one.

Don't you ever orget that in the end, our future is tied to people, that it's more about ideas than a tax.

The human experience can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all decisions are of the past, all decisions are about the future. The image of the future, therefore, is the key to all choice-oriented behavior. The character and quality of the images of the future which prevail in a society is therefore the most important clue to its overall dynamics.

We are often wrong about the past, but at least with the past you can change your thinking. We can't do that with the future.

The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.

It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.

It is good to look to the past to gain appreciation for the present and perspective for the future.

We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.

In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.

Knowledge of the past and an optimistic view of the present give you great opportunities.

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

To look back into the past only makes sense if it serves the future.

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future.

How you see your future is much more important that what has happened in your past.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

You have to keep being curious. The notion that the present is different than the past, and the future will be different than the present, and the present is past, as we say it. I think I, by nature, am an optimist. Maybe I was driven to escape from my childhood and to be something, create my own world or career the way I wanted it to be. And I keep doing that in very interesting ways.

History teaches us hope.

What we make of people, and what we see in the mirror when we look at ourselves, depends on what we know of the world, what we believe to be possible, what memories we have, and whether our loyalties are to the past, the present or the future.