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

Henri Bergson

Cause

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

Peter Berger

Past

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 grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

John Berger

Dying

Past

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.

Bo Bennett

Exaggeration

Past

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.

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.

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.

Walter Benjamin

Past

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.