Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

But it's our curse and our blessing to remember the past and to know there's a future. —Charlie

You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.

The past is all we know of the future.

The best way to suppose what may come, is to remember what is past.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

Treat the past as a school.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.

I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.

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

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

The Present only has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory only, but things to come have no being at all; the Future but a fiction of the mind.

He who would foresee what is to happen should look to what has happened: for all that is has its counterpart in time past.

I write a lot about the past because I really see things clearly in hindsight.

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

Sometimes, I think the things we see are shadows of the things to be; that what we plan we build

Planning for the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers.

Thoughtful people are concerned with the future because that is the only area of experience about which anything can be done. We cannot change the past, and the present is gone as soon as it is reported, but the future is that in which we can make a difference.

I do not believe that any man can adequately appreciate the world of to-day unless he has some knowledge of -- a little more than a slight knowledge, some feeling for and of -- the history of the world of the past.

Photographs open doors into the past, but they also alloq a look into the future

The past is a rich resource on which we can draw in order to make decisions for the future, but it does not dictate our choices. We should look back at the past and select what is good, and leave behind what is bad.

The past gives great examples of what can happen in the future. It's always important to remember.

If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the pompous "wisdom" of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error.