In the past, it was easier to believe in my own effectiveness. If I worked hard, with good colleagues and good ideas, we could make a difference. But now, I sincerely doubt that.

We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present.

The beauty of the past belongs to the past.

If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.

When I was younger, I used to bite my nails so bad. I used to play sports; I played, like, every sport. I would be playing soccer, and I'd be in the middle of the field just zoned out, biting my...

In the past, before phones and the Internet, all communication was face-to-face. Now, most of it is digital, via emails and messaging services. If people were to start using virtual reality, it would...

Probably no one alive hasn't at one time or another brooded over the possibility of going back to an earlier ideal age in his existence and living a different kind of life.

When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which...

However, if Sir Launcelot of the Lake failed now and then in his behavior, who is there in the world shall say, 'I never fell into error'? And if he more than once offended, who is there shall have...

It is a mournful task to break the sombre attachments of the past.

Let us not burthen our remembrance withA heaviness that's gone.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

What is the past but what we choose to remember?

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike...

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

It's best to be ruthless with the past.

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

The past was like those old -fashioned fragrance cushions filled with herbs and flowers, the aroma of which penetrates the clothes and sticks to them.

He ought to let the past keep its glow and not try to mix it with what he had in the present.

At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past.

But thing in the past are like plate that's shattered to pieces. You can never put it back together like it was, right?

It was strange how the future seemed tied inseparably to the past, so that both revolved through the present, like a great wheel...

They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past... They wanted to compel him to cast his life away and become a shadow, a man without past, an actor without a role, and turn even...

Our past thinking has determined our present status, and our present thinking will determine our future status; for man is what man thinks.

I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of...

I think in some ways it's like that for all of us, living with the ghosts of things that used to be, or never were. We're all of us haunted by yesterday, and we got no choice but to keep marching into...

To positively discriminate in favour of groups that have been negatively discriminated against in the past.

That's what I like so much about old libraries - they smell the way we'd like to imagine the past.