Past Quotes

Zen lives in the present. The Whole teaching is: how to be in the present; how to get out of the past which is no more and how not to get involved in the future which is not yet, and just to be rooted, centered, in that which is.

Osho

I advance no exaggerated or fanciful claim for Vegetarianism. It is not, as some have asserted, a panacea for human ills; it is something much more rational -- an essential part of the modern humanitarian movement, which can make no true progress without it. Vegetarianism is the diet of the future, as flesh-food is the diet of the past.

HENRY S. SALT

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

Warren Buffett

The only thing we know for sure about the future is that it will be radically different from the past. In face of this enormous uncertainty, the least we can do for future generations is to pass on as many of the planetís resources as possible.

Norman Myers†

One of the tragedies of modern times is that people have come to believe that something said by someone in the past, perhaps for illustrative or provocation purposes, actually represents that person's beliefs at the time.

Idries Shah

Nostalgic memory is a sudden encounter with the thingness of the thing that has been forgotten, not the continuous desire for possessions, whether past, present, or future.

Marjorie B. Garber

I think that all human systems require continuous renewal. They rigidify. They get stiff in the joints. They forget what they cared about. The forces against it are nostalgia and the enormous appeal of having things the way they have always been, appeals to a supposedly happy past. But we've got to move on.

John W. Gardner

Nostalgia keeps dissolving the ironic narratives in which I have contained my past.

Mason Cooley

I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.

John F. Kennedy

Fighting terrorism is like being a goalkeeper. You can make a hundred brilliant saves but the only shot that people remember is the one that gets past you.

Paul Wilkinson

If you worry about the future, and dwell on the past, you can't enjoy the present

Emily Gibbons

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness

E. T. Bell

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly

Buddha

Any creator owes a debt to past creation.

Lukas Foss

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

Laurence J. Peter