Quotes
Quotes about Past
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
Peace and rest at length have come
All the day's long toil is past,
And each heart is whispering, "Home,
Home at last."
Tho' lost to sight, to memory dear
Thou ever wilt remain;
One only hope my heart can cheer,--
The hope to meet again.
Oh, fondly on the past I dwell,
And oft recall those hours
When, wandering down the shady dell,
We gathered the wild-flowers.
Yes, life then seemed one pure delight,
Tho' now each spot looks drear;
Yet tho' thy smile be lost to sight,
To memory thou art dear.
Oft in the tranquil hour of night,
When stars illume the sky,
I gaze upon each orb of light,
And wish that thou wert by.
I think upon that happy time,
That time so fondly loved,
When last we heard the sweet bells chime,
As thro' the fields we roved.
Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
A dark horsewhich had never been thought of, and which the careless St. James had never even observed in the list, rushed past the grand stand in sweeping triumph.
Trust no future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, act in the living present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!
This is the place. Stand still, my steed,--
Let me review the scene,
And summon from the shadowy past
The forms that once have been.
Strength of heart
And might of limb, but mainly use and skill,
Are winners in this pastime.
Old men must die, or the world would grow mouldy, would only breed the past again.
Whate'er thy joys, they vanish with the day:
Whate'er thy griefs, in sleep they fade away,
To sleep! to sleep!
Sleep, mournful heart, and let the past be past:
Sleep, happy soul, all life will sleep at last.
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
But how carve way i' the life that lies before,
If bent on groaning ever for the past?
Toil is the true knight's pastime.
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past.
The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have been wrong must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.
We have unmistakable proof that throughout all past time, there has been a ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong.
All lost things are in the angels' keeping, Love;
No past is dead for us, but only sleeping, Love.
His eyes
All radiant with glad surprise,
Looked forward through the Centuries
And saw the seeds which sages cast
In the world's soil in cycles past
Spring up and blossom at the last;
Saw how the souls of men had grown,
And where the scythes of Truth had mown
Clear space for Liberty's white throne;
Saw how, by sorrow tried and proved,
The blackening stains had been removed
Forever from the land he loved;
Saw Treason crushed and Freedom crowned,
And clamorous Faction, gagged and bound,
Gasping its life out on the ground.
Ah! what if some unshamed iconoclast
Crumbling old fetish raiments of the past,
Rises from dead cerements the Christ at last?
What if men take to following where He leads,
Weary of mumbling Athanasian creeds?
Late February days; and now, at last,
Might you have thought that Winter's woe was past;
So fair the sky was and so soft the air.
I see not a step before me as I tread on another year;
But I 've left the Past in God's keeping,--the Future
His mercy shall clear;
And what looks dark in the distance may brighten as I draw near.
The Past is like a funeral gone by,
The Future comes like an unwelcome guest.
Yea, howso we dream,
Or how bravely we do;
The end is the same,
Be we traitor or true:
And after the bloom
And the passion is past
Death comes at last.
The glory dies not, and the grief is past.
Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.
