Past and Future

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair.

For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.

Having looked the past in the eye, having asked for forgiveness and having made amends, letus shut the door on the past—not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it to imprison us.

An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why History is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.

Yesternight the sun went hence, And yet is here today.

Time will run back and fetch the Age of Gold.

Plan for the future, because that is where you are going to spend the rest of your life.

Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

Democratic nations care but little for whathas been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure. . . . Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him.

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come, Can yet the lease of my true love control, Suppos’d as forfeit to a confin’d doom. The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur’d, And the sad augurs mock their own presage; Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d, And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.

Life can only be understood backwards…But it must be lived forwards.

Life is a short exile

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened —that, surely was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

The number of portraits one saw of [Emperor Franz Joseph] was almost as great as the number of inhabitants of his realms. . . . Believing in his existence was rather like seeing certain stars although they ceased to exist thousands of years ago.

So many worlds, so much to do,

 

Our plesance here is all vain glory, This false world is but transitory.

 

Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men Tonight from Oxford up your pathway strays! Here came I often, often, in old days— Thyrsis [Arthur Hugh Clough] and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

The “good old times”—all times when old are good— Are gone.