Victor Hugo Quotes

If you find great difficulty in trying to reckon with the future or even the present, I think it's intuitive to start that process by reckoning with the past.

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

The future is keeping you out of the present time.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.

I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.

One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.

If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.

I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about!

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

If we compare the present time with former ages, we find that the same tendencies and desires have at all times governed states and peoples.

Ere we can forecast the future we must understand the present and bring a just sense of proportion to our review of the history of the past.

If we don't have a future, then we haven't got a present.

A few years in the age of nations is nothing.

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

History is weirdly dismissed as not having anything to do with the present moment.

The present time has one advantage over every other - it is our own.

It's hard to understand a moment in history when you are in it.

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.

Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

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.