“The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present.” — Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire
Tag: present
Quote of the Day
“Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.” — Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
Quote of the Day
“The only reason for writing history, I think,is so we can try to understand the present. Because of that, the questions it seems relevant to us to ask about the past are informed by our experience of the present. You’re asking the past different questions from what people did fifty years ago, or will be doing in another fifty years.” — Pat Barker, The Art of Fiction No. 243, The Paris Review (Winter 2018)
Quote of the Day
“That’s what history is. It’s a conversation between the past and the present.” — Lewis H. Lapham, The Art of Editing No. 4, The Paris Review (Summer 2019)
Quote of the Day
“A life in the past cannot be shared with the present.” — Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams
Quote of the Day
“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.” — Kazuo Ishiguro, “Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro,” The Writer (2001-05-05)
Quote of the Day
“I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
Quote of the Day
“The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse.” — Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1753)
Quote of the Day
“You cannot make the present fill the garb of the past … any more than you could make the past fill that of the present.” — Arthur Helps, Friends in Council, First Series
Quote of the Day
“It is not true that youth looks before it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past but with the present, where its elders are so obviously powerful and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten that power.” — William Butler Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil