Idealization of the Past Quotes

Why does the past look so enticing to us? For the same reason why from a distance a meadow with flowers looks like a flower bed.

From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

As a kid, I really loved 'Jane Eyre,' I used to fantasise that the past was so much better and my lifetime was crap.

You look back at a time you idealize now and you only remember the good stuff. You tell the stories about the hard stuff and just laugh about it now. You don't remember how difficult it was to be stranded in Austin after driving 52 hours from Seattle in a rainstorm and having nowhere to stay for five hours. You remember that stuff and laugh about it now. You don't feel it the way you did back then when you were so scared and nervous and tired and hungry. We always idealize the past because we don't feel the painful stuff the way we used to.

Carrying The Beatles' or the Sixties' dream around all your life is like carrying the Second World War and Glenn Miller around. That's not to say you can't enjoy Glenn Miller or The Beatles, but to live in that dream is the twilight zone. It's not living now. It's an illusion.

We sometimes condemn the present, by praising the past; and show our contempt of what is now, by our esteem for what is no more.