Past Significance Quotes

...why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?

The past is a present force.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future.

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

The habit of dwelling on the past, has a narrowing as well as a debilitating influence. Behind us, there is a small, - an almost insignificant measure of time; before us, there is an eternity. It is the natural tendency of the mind to magnify the one, and to diminish the other.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.

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

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

People say, 'Don't live in the past.' But I guess it depends on how interesting your past is.

Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.

Even one's yesterdays could not continue to stir and move in a man's mind unless there were a future for those yesterdays to make.

Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him? Citizens ask, What do they mean to us? Historians are trained to seek the original meaning; all of us want to know the present meaning.

The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist.

Everything you have done and been through is valuable and important. In order to be who you are, to know what you know, to be where you are in this moment, you needed to go through what you went through.

But we cannot just take this historical fact for granted. We must make it live.

I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence.

The sense of one's past is so strong and forms our sense of self so strongly, it will always fascinate, elude and confuse me.

The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

He who wishes to maintain that the past of mankind no longer has any absolute value in lifemust also be ready to deny his ownlife until the present moment, indeed in advance until the last moment, as worthless. He who realizes that culture is the giving of form will also see that the highest forms that it is given to the human spirit to recognize have always been, psychologically considered, such evasions from the present. Considerations such as these do not at all square with the direction of America's mind.

The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

Your past is important but it is not nearly as important to your present as the way you see your future.

I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.