Past, present, and future Quotes

“Impermanence”

“Reincarnation”

“There is nothing new under the sun.”

“Whereof what's past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge.”

“More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.”

“Our duty is to preserve what the past has had to say for itself, and to say for ourselves what shall be true for the future.”

“Man must have been conscious of memories and purposes long before he made any explicit distinction between past, present, and future.”

“An overflowing pot must be emptied before anything new can be added. If you cling to the sorrows of the past, how can you make space for the happiness and joy of the present?”

“Like my three brothers before me, I pick up a fallen standard. Sustained by their memory of our priceless years together I shall try to carry forward that special commitment to justice, to excellence, to courage that distinguished their lives.”

“There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called "a blessed act of oblivion". We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.”

“The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water…. I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living:" that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.”

“The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

“The point at issue between the two theories [A and B theory] is whether 'time' really is, in some deep ontological sense, differentiated into past, present and future. ...Reichenbach and Whitrow propose that there is indeed such a type of event and this is the 'becoming', or 'coming into being' of factual states-of-affairs in the physical world.
Reichenbach ...claimed that 'becoming' is in fact made manifest through the Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg: "The concept of becoming, he wrote, acquires a meaning in physics: The present, which separates the future from the past, is the moment when that which was undetermined becomes determined, and 'becoming' means the same as 'becoming determined' ".
Whitrow expressed ..."The past is the determined, the present is the moment of 'becoming' when events become determined, and the future is as-yet undetermined.
Although neither Reichenbach nor Whitrow developed their thesis at any length, the general purport of what they meant is clear: there is a basic chance element in nature, at least at the micro-level, and the moment of 'becoming', which they identify with 'the present', is marked by a transition from what is merely possible to what is factual. However... this important attempt to provide a physical basis for the A-theory is by no means immune from criticism.”