Quotes about Past

The past makes a good bishop but a poor king." "What does that mean?" I said. "It means that it's good to take counsel from the past but not to be ruled by it. Otherwise we end up using today to fight yesterday's battles and miss tomorrow's promise.

Some own up to their past. Some are owned by their past. The wise take what they can from the past and then leave it behind.

Forgiveness is release — to unlock the cage of another's folly to set ourselves free. To not forgive is to chain oneself to people and circumstances of the past. In doing so, our past becomes our future.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it. God's purpose is not limited by your past.

But bid life seize the present? It lives less in the present Than in the future always, And less in both together Than in the past. The present Is too much for the senses, Too crowding, too confusing— Too present to imagine.

What is needed desperately today is prophetic insight. Scholars can interpret the past; it takes prophets to interpret the present.

The present moment dies every moment to become the past , is reborn every moment into the future. All experience is now. Now never ends.

We all owe emotional debts to the past, in the form of feelings we couldn't allow ourselves to express. The past isn't over as long as these debts go unpaid. You don't have to return to the person who made you angry or afraid, with the intention of revising how the past turned out. For that person, the impact can never be the same as it is for you. The purpose of getting rid of emotional debt is to find your place in the present.

Uncertainty, on the other hand, is the fertile ground of pure creativity and freedom. Uncertainty means stepping into the unknown in every moment of our existence. The unknown is the field of all possibilities, ever fresh, ever new, always open to the creation of new manifestations. Without uncertainty and the unknown, life is just the stale repetition of outworn memories. You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is your self left over from yesterday.

Whatever you most fear- abandonment, rejection, failure, loss, humiliation, has already occurred to you. The threats you perceive around you now, or coming at you in the future are the long shadow being cast by your past.

Psychologically, stress results whenever anxiety about the future or regrets about the past are invoked.