past vs present Quotes

Don't judge the past by the standards of today. It won't work. They're incompatible.

I was always obsessed with ancient Egypt, but any time you go back to wouldn't be as good for women as now - so it might be a quick visit.

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present.

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.

A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.

The good old days are neither better nor worse than the ones we're living through right now.

It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life.

There's a sort of romanticizing of the past. When you actually think about the past, you know it's a little different.

The present necessarily betrays the past.

And it is clear to Evan, now: the difference between what is and what has been done; the present and the past. He sees that what he does and who he is isn't based on the past unless he wants it to be... No. That is the past, which has been seen differently through many different eyes and has become hazy and unclear, like a pond when stirred with a stick. Only the present moment is clear and free from prejudice.

Would the boy you were be proud of the man you are?

People who live in the past generally are afraid to compete in the present. I've got my faults, but living in the past is not one of them. There's no future in it.

The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour

Yesterday's answers has nothing to do with today's questions.

Why has everything got to be about feelings these days? In the old days, no one knew what anyone was feeling and, what's more, they weren't expected to.

All these old images of me floating across the screen, the terrible chasm of what you were and what you are. I know who I am, but these people who see me as I was then don't.

All the past is not worth one today.

Originally the structure was . . . a modern narrator who would appear intermittently and talk about his memories of his grandmother, which would then be juxtaposed against scenes from the past. But the stories from the past were always more interesting that the things in the present. I find this almost endemic to modern plays that veer between past and present. . . . So as we've gone on developing GOLDEN CHILD, the scenes from the past have become more dominant, and all that remains of the present are these two little bookends that frame the action.

You can't really live in the past because the present is always present.

You can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past. They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don't know how it's going to come out. They weren't just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can't understand them if you don't understand how they perceived reality.

We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.

I try, in the present, to not exalt the past because I think that's such a way of diminishing the present. And it's hard to live like that.

You can never forget the time you're living in because the past is the past and it will never come back. So to adjust your philosophy and creativity in fashion to the time you're living in is the most important thing.

Something of great importance now past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in that the latter is a reality, and related to the former as something to nothing.

Things ain't what they used to be and never were.