Past and Future

I speak no comfort to you, for there is no comfort for such pain within the circles of the world. The uttermost choice is before you: to repent and go to the Havens and bear away into the West the memory of our days together that shall there be evergreen but never more than memory; or else to abide the Doom of Men.

 

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

 

Life seems to me like a Japanese picture which our imagination does not allow to end with the margin. We aim at the infinite and when our arrow falls to earth it is in flames.

 

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

There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled—and it sleeps for ever in most historians—there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

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.

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

 

Few can foresee whither their road will lead them, till they come to its end. J. R. R.

For I dipped into the future, as far as human eye could see, saw a vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.

So many worlds, so much to do,

 

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.

 

It is a period between two wars—the long week-end it has been called.

 

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

 

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.

 

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

 

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

 

So that, in the end, there was no end.

L’avenir est comme le reste: il n’est plus ce qu’il était .

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.

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.

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.

Dieu est, ou il n’est pas. Mais de quel côté pencherons-nous? La raison n’y peut rien déterminer. Il y’a un chaos infini qui nous sépare. Il se joue un jeu, à l’extrémité de cette distance infinie, où il arrivera croix ou pile: que gagerez-vous?