Quotes About Understanding The Past

#1. Absolute truisms rot brains absolutely.[ ... ]'Power corrupts' is useless as a tool for understanding the past, and gives us nothing as a guide to action.

Steven Brust

#2. The task of understanding the past is neverending.

Susanna Moore

#3. It states, History should be regarded as a means for understanding the past and solving the challenges of the future. It also suggests that this celebration of the end of slavery is an important and enriching part of the history and heritage of the United States.

Mark Foley

#4. Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

Paul Fussell

#5. to know your past is to know your future. Where lies the strength of the stem and the fruits of the branches when the roots are rotten?

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#6. None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history.

Hannah Arendt

#7. There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

Douglas Hurd

#8. If you would understand the present, you must come to know the past.

Libba Bray

#9. learn the lessons before they are over. Life is a composition of series and sequence of lessons. Each lesson comes with its own lessons to learn. our failure to learn the lessons of one shall be the reasons to learn another lesson with similar lessons.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#10. Asa had a sharp understanding of the future
that is, a time when this would be past. Time was rushing through and around him, he almost heard it whistling, and this awareness rounded the world somehow and made it sweet.

Susanna Kaysen

#11. You need to be able to ride past the technology by understanding what it can do, who you are, and where you want to take it. You don't want technology to lead you; you want to lead it, but it's very hard to do that when you're in the middle of it.

Paula Scher

#12. The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it. His mind was too young and too narrow to withstand the onrush of her life.

Karen Russell

#13. Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard's wheel has already changed past understanding.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#14. Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the past, and one must study very carefully the technic of the chief current professionals.

H.L. Mencken

#15. When you can identify the insecurities inside the person that is hurting you then you can begin to heal. It isn't about you. It is about their past.

Shannon L. Alder

#16. To even envision a post-racist society is contingent upon understanding the offensive, dense, and wildly contradictory nature of our racist past and present. Racechanges should be encouragement enough for readers to begin that task.

Gayle Pemberton

#17. My father taught me that you can you read a hundred books on wisdom and write a hundred books on wisdom, but unless you apply what you learned then its only words on a page. Life is not lived with intentions, but action.

Shannon L. Alder

#18. I'll never stop dreaming that one day we can be a real family, together, all of us laughing and talking, loving and understanding, not looking at the past but only to the future.

LaToya Jackson

#19. Understanding and accepting the decisions you have made, good or bad, will make you bolder. Reflection helps punctuate your past and indent your future.

Farshad Asl

#20. We need a proper understanding of the past to correctly judge the present if we ever are to foretell the future.

Craig D. Idso

#21. Compassion does not have to be a face-to-face relationship. Forgiveness does not imply friendship. Understanding why someone has inflicted pain on us is how we set ourselves free of the past, not how we excuse someone's behaviour so they can continue to abuse us.

Vironika Tugaleva

#22. History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past ... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

Alan Bullock

#23. They ran past him without notice, but I paused and stood over the boy. I wanted to feel something--wanted to find some understanding in his actions; some empathy in his upbringing; at least a fragment of sympathy for the secret he carried.

Christopher Scotton

#24. Not to sound too Dr. Phil all of a sudden, but I think the key to survival is to embrace one's past and to not run away from it. And to come to some sort of relationship with it or understanding of it.

Anderson Cooper

#25. Time doesn't always heal all wounds.

A.J. Darkholme

#26. The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding

Will Durant

#27. Those who claim that to leave the E.U. would damage the City are the very same as those who in the past confidently predicted, with a classic failure of understanding, that the City would be gravely damaged if the U.K. failed to adopt the euro as its currency.

Nigel Lawson

#28. It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history.

Eugene Jarecki

#29. To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult.

Lin Yutang

#30. History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

Ken Loach

#31. He imagined his past gone, along with his future. Death was the understanding of the immediate present: that there is finally nothing else.

Anne Rice

#32. We view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present

E.H. Carr

#33. Understanding can lead to liberation. Knowledge can bring freedom from the past. For those who don't take the time to understand their past and are blind to how it has shaped them, the road to true love can be difficult.

Debra Fileta

#34. Whether we live in Sri Lanka or Malaysia or India, the U.K. or the U.S., we face similar issues of understanding, remembering the past that has made us and seeing the future we want.

Romesh Gunesekera

#35. Vaccination was, and is, thoroughly infused with our politics, our social values, and our cultural norms. By acknowledging and understanding the divergent reasons why we've vaccinated in the past, however, we just may ensure the continued success of vaccination in the future.

Elena Conis

#36. Understanding where you come from means taking a good hard look at your past and giving yourself the freedom to learn from it.

Debra Fileta

#37. the studious examination of the past in the greatest of detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#38. We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

Milan Kundera

#39. Knowledge is not the same as morality, but we need to understand if we are to avoid past mistakes and move in productive directions. An important part of that understanding is knowing who we are and what we can do ... Ultimately, we must synthesize our understandings for ourselves.

Howard Gardner

#40. Exploring and colonizing Mars can bring us new scientific understanding of climate change, of how planet-wide processes can make a warm and wet world into a barren landscape. By exploring and understanding Mars, we may gain key insights into the past and future of our own world.

Buzz Aldrin

#41. The work of God is done on God's timetable. His answers to our prayers come always in time
His time. His thoughts are far higher than ours, His wisdom past understanding.

Elisabeth Elliot

#42. While, naturally, he has to gauge risk, to read the elements, he still often bemoans the hardships of the past. He constantly puzzles over the role of remote influences, like the after-life. He wants to know why events happen as they do, how control is exercised from beyond understanding.

Peter Gray

#43. Emphasis should be placed more on what the patient does in the present and will do in the future than on a mere understanding of why some long-past event occurred.

Milton H. Erickson

#44. History teaches us every day; our understanding is the matter!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#45. There is no teacher, living or past, who can give us the actual understanding of Truth. A teacher can only put our feet upon the path and point the way. That is all. It is wholly dependent on the individual to make his way to Truth.

Paul Twitchell

#46. When we look at the past from beyond the perspective of sadness and error, without judgment, without right or wrong, understanding it was part of our chosen experience, then the past is healed. And by healing I mean that it is seen with wisdom and insight rather than judgment and scorn.

Linda Hoppe

#47. I don't think the news department will have to lie down and play dead like it has in the past. By and large the network has been understanding, but then so have I.

Roone Arledge

#48. When the drum beat comes to an end, you shall not hear the drum beat again, but you shall remember how it sounded, and you shall understand clearly how you should or should not have danced to the drum beat

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#49. We can cherish nothing less than our random understanding of death and the earth-shaking love that draws us to one another ... Cleanliness and valor will be our watchwords. Nothing less will get us past the armed sentry and over the mountainous border.

John Cheever

#50. My memories always clutch my brain to understand the past

Munia Khan

#51. What has been done is little - scarcely a beginning; yet it is much in comparison with the total blank of a century past. And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us.

Agnes Mary Clerke

#52. Judgement is always based on experience and sometimes you will battle a person's history first, before commonsense will ever win the war.

Shannon L. Alder

#53. if people do not understand you outrightly, do not worry; understand people outrightly and act with wisdom, courage and understanding

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#54. Without a good understanding of history how can we make informed and therefore good and sensible decisions about current issues? The future then can only be made better by knowledge of the past.

Keith Tonkin

#55. I've worked very hard at understanding myself, learning to be assertive. I'm past the point where I worry about people liking me.

Pam Dawber

#56. Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children's understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make.
The Killer Hook

Michael Chabon

#57. The point of history, the very essence of it as a field of study, is to find correspondences. You look at the past so that you can understand it, and through it you come to a better understanding of your own time. If you're lucky, sometimes you can even extrapolate to possible futures." "I'm not

M.R. Carey

#58. I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues of the past and thereby contribute to understanding the issues and conditions of the present and future.

Charles Lindbergh

#59. Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them: by understanding the present through the lens of the past.

Dara Horn

#60. The job of being president, understanding the particular policies that America has gotten itself into over the past 400 years.

Kwame Kilpatrick

#61. The creation message has matured over the past three decades, as the discernment and understanding of creationist leaders has matured. More and more, the emphasis is on the foundational issue: compromise of Genesis ultimately undermines the gospel itself.

Ken Ham

#62. There is no judgment upon you; there is no memory of the past; there is only the understanding of this moment.

Joel Goldsmith

#63. Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.

Drew Gilpin Faust

#64. that the wars of the past were slowly being forgotten. Shea believed that one could turn his back on the past and build a new world with the future, never understanding that the future was inextricably tied to the past, an interwoven tapestry of events and ideas that would never be entirely severed.

Terry Brooks

#65. The mental game of business is understanding this Paradox: the better you think you are doing, the greater should be your cause for concern: the more self-satisfied you are with your accomplishments, your past achievements, your 'right moves', the less you should be.

Mark McCormack

#66. We explain by means of purely intellectual processes, but we understand by means of the cooperation of all the powers of the mind in comprehension. In understanding we start from the connection of the given, living whole, in order to make the past comprehensible in terms of it.

Wilhelm Dilthey

#67. Hindsight is not necessarily the best guide to understanding what really happened. The past is often as distorted by hindsight as it is clarified by it.

Amos Elon

#68. M. Danglars, who had listened to all this preamble with imperturbable coolness, but without understanding a word, engaged as he was, like every man burdened with thoughts of the past, in seeking the thread of his own ideas in those of the speaker.

Alexandre Dumas

#69. But as Hegel teaches us, beginnings are necessarily problematic. (As are endings.) How can I describe my first encounter with Ana fairly, when my understanding of her essence has passed through infinite iterations over the past four and a half years? My

Alena Graedon

#70. When you define yourself based on things you have done, in order to maintain that self-image you must constantly look away from the present moment, as you search for a means of self-understanding through past experiences.

Chris Matakas

#71. A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.

Robert A. Heinlein

#72. Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.

James Robertson

#73. The journey of the mind always has longer to travel than the heart because dreams carry weight, while love makes you float.

Shannon L. Alder

#74. I also forgive myself. May the misfortunes of the past no longer weigh on my heart. Instead of pain and resentment, I choose understanding and compassion. Instead of rebellion, I choose the music from my violin. Instead of grief, I choose forgetting. Instead of vengeance, I choose victory.

Paulo Coelho

#75. Neurosis is the rule, not the exception', and grasping this can help us to see that we are not alone. It is also the starting point for understanding what went wrong and learning that we have a choice: we can simply re-enact the past, or we can rewrite the script.

Oliver James

#76. anxiety is out of place in the present moment. It depends on the past and the future for its existence. This understanding matters if you hope to let go of your struggle with anxiety.

Kelly G. Wilson

#77. God forgives us, as - when - we forgive them who injure us - and ourselves. These last weeks I think I have understood what many times in the past I thought I knew - but we never know - we never reach the end of understanding - the understanding of God - the mystery of his love ...

Lucy Beckett

#78. The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.

Edward Hallett Carr

#79. Sometimes those who love most deeply can't get past the weight of their own feelings.

James L. Halperin

#80. The deciphering of ancient scripts changed forever the way Europeans were able to imagine the story of humanity, destroying centuries of received authority about the past with repercussions as important for our understanding of time and history as the geological studies of the same period.

Neil MacGregor

#81. They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.

Donald Miller

#82. By understanding the basic impediments to forgiveness, the repercussions of failing to forgive and the fruits of forgiveness, this will lead you gently to the shoreline of a distinct new and more powerful YOU.

Stephen Richards

#83. With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present.

Kenneth M. Stampp

#84. History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam papers. It is not about judging the dead. It is about understanding the meaning of the past - to realize the whole evolving human story over centuries, not just our own lifetimes.

Ian Mortimer

#85. Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.

Jack Kerouac

#86. Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.

Paulo Freire

#87. Lord Jesus, Your love is beyond my understanding but I believe it's true. Right now I offer You my shame, the filthy rags of my past. I choose to step out of this storm of condemnation and into Your peace. Thank You for loving me and for making me worthy, In Your great name, amen.

Sheila Walsh

#88. There is a need in every generation to study the past, to absorb its spirit, to preserve its messages ... it's a collaboration of ourselves and our ancestors, the result is a deeper understanding for individuals and in consequence, a broader culture for the nation.

Christopher Tunnard

#89. Understand the nature and influence of repeating patterns, from childhood experiences or even from past lives. Wthout understanding, patterns tend to repeat, unnecessarily damaging the relationship.

Brian L. Weiss

#90. My gaze zeroed in on his as if I was a compass needle and he was my north. I'd never suffered a phenomenon such as this. Never been so tuned to another. Perhaps we were kindred souls - linked by something past the realm of understanding. Kismet.

Pepper Winters

#91. This crisis is not just a crisis. Consumers are understanding for the first time that [their] degree of personal happiness doesn't rise past a certain earnings threshold.

Fernando Rodes Vila

#92. Ingrid stared at him and again wondered about the boy she had loved and nurtured for the past five years. She always knew he was Chinese, of course, but that was an entirely different thing from understanding what it was to be Chinese. Lee

Beth Cato

#93. My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined.

Penelope Lively