Sigmund Freud Quotes

I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

History makes one wise, but not competent to solve concrete problems.

It is bad enough to know the past; it would be intolerable to know the future.

The wise form right judgment of the present from what is past.

Surely knowledge of the natural world, knowledge of the human condition, knowledge of the nature and dynamics of society, knowledge of the past so that one may use it in experiencing the present and aspiring to the future--all of these, it would seem reasonable to suppose, are essential to an educated man. To these must be added another--knowledge of the products of our artistic heritage that mark the history of our esthetic wonder and delight.

Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

By how much one man has more experience of things past, than another, by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him.

To build up a future, you have to know the past.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

I think you can learn from history.

The thing about looking back over Clinton's presidency, and probably anybody's presidency, is that when you look back, the events all line up in a way that makes sense. At the time, you don't know where it's going.

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past

We learn from history. That's what it's all about.

Insufficient facts always invite danger.

If you don't know everything, you must go on with what you do know.

Prudence is a presumption of the future, contracted from the experience of time past.

The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

Everyone must learn from the past.

Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.

If you don't know history, it is as if you were born yesterday.

History is our guide, and without a knowledge of history, we are lost!

It is ignorance that causes most mistakes.

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.

The past is important for all the information and wisdom it holds. But you can get lost in it. You've got to learn to keep the knowledge of the past with you as you pursue the present.