I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

When I think about the past, the types of things they did, I feel angry, but then again that is my feeling. The brain always dominates, says, as I have pointed out, you have a limited time to stay on Earth. You must try and use that period to transform.

The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.

The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.

Even if I say ‘I do not forgive you’ to someone who asks my forgiveness, but whom I understand and who understands me, then the process of reconciliation has begun.

Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.

To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it more fit for its prime function of looking forward.

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writ.

Don’t tell us/how to love, don’t tell us/how to grieve, or what/to grieve for, or how loss/shouldn’t sit down like a gray/bundle of dust in the deepest/pockets of our energy, don’t laugh at our belief/that money isn’t/everything, don’t tell us/how to behave in/anger, in longing, in loss, in home-/sickness, don’t tell us,/dear friends.

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

New terms are created for the country or region in question – denazification in Germany after Hitler, defascistization in Italy, dejuntafication, decommunization – but they all express the same attempt of a liberated society to purge the remnants of its vilified recent past.

Consider the past and you shall know the future.

The present is never our goal: the past and present are our means: the future alone is our goal. Thus, we never live but we hope to live; and always hoping to be happy, it is inevitable that we will never be so.

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Study the past if you would divine the future.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Young victims of political, ethnic or religious aggression carry the effects of their traumatic experiences throughout their lives. This unhealed hurt and resentment can become the basis for new violence.

As for goals that we seek to reach by remembering the past, the answer is not so simple: The judgments that we make derive from a choice of values rather than from a search for truth. We must compare the gains that follow from any use of the past.

He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.

I don't think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking there's some kind of change.

THE CHILD is father to the man.’ How can he be? The words are wild. Suck any sense from that who can: ‘The child is father to the man.’ No; what the poet did write ran, ‘The man is father to the child.’ ‘The child is father to the man!’ How can he be? The words are wild.

We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.

Es gibt wenig Menschen, die sich mit dem Nächstvergangenen zu beschäftigen wissen. Entweder das Gegenwärtige hält uns mit Gewalt an sich oder wir verlieren uns in die Vergangenheit und suchen das völlig Verlorene.

You have to know the past to understand the present.

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

The past is never there when you try to go back. It exists, but only in memory. To pretend otherwise is to invite a mess.

We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future.

When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.