Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.
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Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. In is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and a manly heart.
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We held hands on the last night on earth. Our mouths filled with dust, we kissed in the fields and under trees, screaming like dogs, bleeding dark into the leaves. It was empty on the edge of town but we knew everyone floated along the bottom of the river. So we walked through the waste where the road curved into the sea and the shattered seasons lay, and the bitter smell of burning was on you like a disease.In our cancer of passion you said, 'Death is a midnight runner.' The sky had come crashing down like the news of an intimate suicide. We picked up the shards and formed them into shapes of stars that wore like an antique wedding dress. The echoes of the past broke the hearts of the unborn as the ferris wheel silently slowed to a stop. The few insects skidded away in hopes of a better pastime. I kissed you at the apexof the maelstrom and asked if you would accompany me ina quick fall, but you made me realize that my ticket wasn't good for two. I rode alone. You said,'The cinders are falling like snow.' There is poetry in despair, and we sang with unrivaled beauty, bitter elegies of savagery and eloquence.Of blue and grey. Strange, we ran down desperate streets and carvedour names in the flesh of the city. The sun has stagnated somewhere beyond the rim of the horizon and the darkness is a mystery of curves and line.Still, we lay under the emptiness and drifted slowly outward,and somewhere in the wilderness we foundsalvation scratched into the earth like a message. the untitled poem--afi
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The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.
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I think of you often and make no outward show, But what it means to lose you, no one will ever know You wished no one farewell, not even said good-bye, You were gone before I knew it, and only God knows why. You are not forgotten nor will you ever be, As long as life and memories last, I will remember thee. To some you may be forgotten, to others a part of the past, But to me who loved you dearly, your memories will always last. Nothing can be more beautiful than the memories I have of you. To me, you were someone special, God must have thought so too! If tears could build a staircase and memories a lane, I would walk all the way to Heaven, and bring you back again.
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Here lies interred in the eternity of the past, from whence there is no resurrection for the days -- whatever there may be for the dust -- the thirty-third year of an ill-spent life, which, after a lingering disease of many months sank into a lethargy, and expired, January 22d, 1821, A.D. leaving a successor inconsolable for the very loss which occasioned its existence.
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I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
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Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
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Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West, From North and South, come the pilgrim and guest, When the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board The old broken links of affection restored, When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more, And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before. What moistens the lips and what brightens the eye? What calls back the past, like the rich pumpkin pie?
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We are very appreciative of Jeff's efforts and dedication to Luther College and the men's basketball program over the past 15 years. Under Jeff's leadership, the men's basketball program has been competitive, continually displayed a high level of integrity, and enriched the lives of our student-athletes both on and off the basketball court.
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The present-day mentality, more perhaps than that of people in the past, seems opposed to a God of mercy, and in fact tends to exclude from life and to remove from the human heart the very idea of mercy. The word and the concept of 'mercy' seem to cause uneasiness in man, who, thanks to the enormous development of science and technology, never before known in history, has become master of the earth and has subdued and dominated it. This dominion over the earth, sometimes understood in a one-sided and superficial way, seems to leave no room for mercy....
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Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
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For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.
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Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past. I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast.
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We recorded that EP with an aspiring sound engineer and played a lot of graduation parties. Surprisingly, we grew the most after I left for Marquette (in fall 2004). We've learned how to play our instruments really well in the past year.
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Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.
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To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust.
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The past two games, we've played five innings of good baseball. They continued to put pressure on us, and we just didn't make the plays.
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You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
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Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
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The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This
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The original story, whatever it was, was told to those who forgot some details and substituted others. The original is long lost in the restorations. They have had the composer accompanied by a gifted sister, who, the inflexible record shows, died years before the song was written. They have seated him at the prim old spindle-legged mahogany desk in the hall at Federal Hill and had him dash it off in the frenzy of inspiration. Or they have followed him to the rocks of the old spring house, whither they have sent him, pencil in hand, and counted the frowns of agony with which he laboriously set down now a strain of melody and again a phrase of words. They have heard him trying it out with the deep booming bass voice of him who had never more than a weak but sweet light baritone. Every writer of it has himself for the hero and has described it as he would himself have acted it before the grand audience of posterity. These various stories cling about Federal Hill, the outgrowth of the human desire for contact with the vague figures of the past.
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He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.
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Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
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You are young. No hungry generations tread you down.... The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost...
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As I rejected amnesty, so I reject revenge. I ask all Americans who ever asked for goodness and mercy in their lives, who ever sought forgiveness for their trespasses, to join in rehabilitating all the casualties of the tragic conflict of the past. (On Americans who avoided conscription during the Vietnam War, to Veterans of Foreign Wars)
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The modern age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix. The earthly rhythms that characterize a more pastoral way of life have been shunted aside to make room for the fast track of an urbanized existence. Lost in a sea of perpetual technological transition, modern man and woman find themselves increasingly alienated from the ecological choreography of the planet.
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There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit; we must sleep and therefore we must dream.
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The past is interesting not only for the beauty which the artists for whom it was the present were able to extract from it, but also as past, ...
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We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us. Ideas of the Stone Age exist side by side with the latest scientific thought. Only a fraction of mankind has emerged from the Dark Ages, and in the most lucid brains, as Logan Pearsall Smith has said, we come upon nests of woolly caterpillars. Seemingly sane men entrust their wealth to stargazers and their health to witch doctors. Giant planes throb through the stratosphere, but half their passengers are wearing magic amulets and are protected from harm by voodoo incantations. Hotels boast of express elevators and a telephone in every room, but omit thirteen from all floor and room numbers lest their guests be ill at ease.
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