Romanticizing the past Quotes

Everything looks more beautiful in retrospect.

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.

To be honest, I tend to romanticize the past, and though I appreciate all the conveniences of modern life, sometimes I yearn for simpler times.

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

We are always yapping about the 'Good Old Days' and how we look back and enjoy it, but I tell you there is a lot of hooey to it. There is a whole lot of all our past lives that wasn't so hot.

The minute you think that the past was better, your present is second hand, and yourself becomes vintage - it’s okay for clothes not that great for people

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.

I grew up in the countryside . But there's a danger of us romanticizing that. Because when I was a kid in 1982, that's what my parents were saying to me about television and comics and computer games!

I would have preferred to have been born in any other time than our own.

All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.

The past. The Golden Age of the past. What a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don't want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.

I think it's very disheartening and undermining to focus on nostalgia or youthful sentimentality as the lens through which you view art and culture, because then you feel like everything good already happened. I really just try to be in the present with music and just find the things that are invigorating and make me feel happy to be alive right now.

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

You will soon discover that in matters of the heart, memories are much kinder than reality

I just want to say one thing about the '70s. Enough with this purer, "It was a better time," business. Every time is about as polluted and needy and beautiful as most other times. I was around in the '70s, and people were just as ambitious and envious and filled with need and desire as they are today.

The more we idealize the past and refuse to acknowledge our childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.

Posterity will say as usual: "In the past things were better, the present is worse than the past.

I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.

How many people long for that "past, simpler, and better world," I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?

I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine.

I'm always a little unnerved when I see a show that's set in the past that implies in any way that things were nicer then.

Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth-that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent, and every setback insuperable?

Sometimes people who had been together for a long time got to imagining that things used to be better, even when they weren't.

My songs are cinematic so they seem to reference a glamorous era or fetishize certain lifestyles, but that's not my aim.