Past and Future

I came to explore the wreck.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

O who knows what slumbers in the background of the times?

 

Then on the shore

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

Equations are more important to me because politics is for the present but an equation is something for eternity.

 

I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught in some moorings. I am always tying up and then deciding to depart.

Or ever the knightly years were gone With the old world to the grave, I was a King in Babylon And you were a Christian Slave.

One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything that makes others happy.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

 

I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed.

And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.

What shall I do to be forever known, And make the age to come my own?

Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend you The wings of the future, for I have them.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

The world’s great age begins anew,

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, And in a little while our lips are dumb. Let us alone. What is it that will last? All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.

 

We have trained them [men] to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

 

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.