Richard Ford Quotes

If the present tries to sit in judgment of the past, it will lose the future.

Knowledge is not the same as morality, but we need to understand if we are to avoid past mistakes and move in productive directions. An important part of that understanding is knowing who we are and what we can do... Ultimately, we must synthesize our understandings for ourselves.

I must admit, maybe I am a piece of history after all.

What people don't understand is that it wasn't about Dean or Eddie, it was about whether or not I was in the right place.

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

There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge.

The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

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

I consider my selfbeing ... that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man.

To find out what we presently are and where we are going, we must know what we have been and what others have done; and this, because the humanities are at once the creation and the interpreters of the past, is the great purpose of humanistic scholarship.

To deny our pasts is to burn the bridge we must cross to self-understanding.

I do not believe that any man can adequately appreciate the world of to-day unless he has some knowledge of -- a little more than a slight knowledge, some feeling for and of -- the history of the world of the past.

You can only understand the present age when it is past.

So easy it is to see the errors of past ages, so difficult to acknowledge our own!

We read books to find out who we are.

Every one is least known to himself, and it is very difficult for a man to know himself.

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

A phenomenon occurs but because you're in the middle of it, you just think it's your life-until it's over. And then you look back and say, What an unusual thing happened to me in the '60s.

If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the pompous "wisdom" of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error.

If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

We live our lives based on who we think we are.

But where was I to start? The world is so vast, I shall start with the country I knew best, my own. But my country is so very large. I had better start with my town. But my town, too, is large. I had best start with my street. No, my home. No, my family. Never mind, I shall start with myself.

We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.

To "know thyself" must mean to know the malignancy of one's own instincts and to know, as well, one's power to deflect it.