Past and Future
J.R.R. Tolkien
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
E.M. Forster
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.
E.M. Forster
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.
Stephen Hawking
Equations are more important to me because politics is for the present but an equation is something for eternity.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Few can foresee whither their road will lead them, till they come to its end. J. R. R.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
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.
J.M. Barrie
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.
C.S. Lewis
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.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
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.
Desmond Tutu
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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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.