Pastoral Resources

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

I love New York City. Everyone is busy with their own lives - and no one is interested in some Hollywood celebrity walking past in downtown Manhattan.

This fact immediately suggested a singular event - that at some time in the distant past the universe began expanding from an extremely small size. To many people this inference was loaded with overtones of a supernatural event - the creation, the beginning of the universe.

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

In the past, we spoke of poverty, misery only in the south. Now there is a lot of misery, a lot of bad that creates victims in the north as well. This has become manifest: the global system was not made to serve the good of all, but to serve multinational companies.

Children have in the past and continue to influence policy makers.

I shall go further and say that even if an examination of the past could lead to any valid prediction concerning man's future, that prediction would be the contrary of reassuring.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present.

Resume: a written exaggeration of only the good things a person has done in the past, as well as a wish list of the qualities a person would like to have.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.

It is pretty clear that they are ineffective in stopping the course of thought at present, but they have not always been so in the past and we cannot be sure that they will not be so in the future.

There is no such thing as a good or bad ad in isolation. What is good at one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past.