Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

I am never free of the past. I have made it crystal clear that I believe the past is part of the present which becomes part of the future.

The past did affect the present and the future, in ways you could see and a million ones you couldn't. Time wasn't a thing you could divide easily; there was no defined middle or beginning or end. I could pretend to leave the past behind, but it would not leave me.

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

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.

The present grows within the boundaries of the past.

The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn't want to suggest that the past determines the present.

The present is the past biting into the future.

The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.

Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody's present pops out of nowhere.

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.

Time will end all my troubles, but I don't always approve of Time's methods.

Memory is the keyword which combines past with present, past and future.

The power of the past does not depend on our knowledge of it.

You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.

The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or wonder or sorrow than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.

The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.

The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.

As a musician you have to keep one foot back in the past and have one foot forward into the future.