Past life

“ Let us all take care, as the daily life rolls swiftly on, that we lay up happy memories, or at least pleasant memories, when that daily life has become the past,—the past which, when it was the present, was, alas! ”

“ For, as I turn back into our own world, I remember that this past was once verily and actually the present; that these dead things, these long-forgotten people, were once intensely alive; that the tragedy and the comedy of existence went on then as it goes on to-day; and that in the breasts of men and women fashioned like ourselves beat human hearts, after all, very like our own. Hope and disappointment, joy and despair; the memory of yesterday, the expectation of the morrow; the hunger and thirst of the spirit; the lust of the eye; the pride of life ”

“ Stand with me on the heights of History, and looking far around on the wild arena of human destiny, can you transfer yourself to the vale of the past, the physically dead and buried, but spiritually immortal life, which forms the being and substance of all History? ”

“ What an interesting and varied picture do these dates present to my mind's eye, and how many remembrances are associated with them of joy and sorrow, of trial and happiness! I could willingly spend hours in recalling all in detail, and I feel as if it would do us both good, should I do so; for I find that, in the full occupation of the present, the lessons of the past are losing their power over me. Their voice cannot be heard in the busy bustle of life ”

“ And yet is the past nothing, even our past, but as you, quickened by its examples, instructed by its experiences, warned by its voices, assisted by its accumulated instrumentality, shall reproduce it in the life of to-day. Its once busy existence, various sensations, fiery trials, dear-bought triumphs; its dynasty of heroes, all its pulses of joy and anguish, and hope and fear, and love and praise, are with the years beyond the flood. "The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures." ”

“ Your life has been prolonged until the world has changed around you. You have treasured up all that time has rendered worthless,—the principles, feelings, manners, modes of being and acting, which another generation has flung aside,—and you are a symbol of the past. ”

“ The past is effaced, and the future recedes into some unformulated atmosphere. Life, a thousand lifetimes, concentrate themselves in the present. A supreme experience has always this peculiarity,—that it bars out all the past and all the future. ”

“ Yet many of her untaught notions remind of other seers of a larger scope. She, too, receives this life as one link in a long chain; and thinks that immediately after death, the meaning of the past life will appear to us as one word. ”

“ Oh, love thy God and fellow men, thyself consider last, For come it will when thou must count dark errors of the past, And when the fight of life is o'er, and life recedes from view, And heaven in all its glory shines midst the pure and good and true, Then you will see more clearly the proverb deep and vast— The mill will never grind with water that is past. ”

“ By rightly using each moment you will build up a character that will stand a monument upon the tomb of the dead past. Moments misspent are life and character gone, and no imprint is left on the hearts of men to tell that we have lived. How many golden moments are flying away into eternity unladen with any fruit from your life? Learn to value time. Redeem it because these days are evil. ”

“ But if I am here when the leaves are all fallen, the programme of my life will have changed, and this story of the dead past will be illuminated by the light of a living present which will irradiate all its saddening features. ”

“ All that made life lovely is gone—youth, fortune, and household gods. My children are in bloody graves—she who bore them preceded them to eternity; yet I live on, and sigh, and remember, while imagination peoples with the past the scenes about me. ”

“ When reverie brings before us in quick succession the scenes of by-gone years, how do the features of olden friends, dim and shadowy as the grave in which many of them are laid, flit before us! How they carry us to other scenes and other places! The thoughts which fill the mind when thus musing on the past are always of a chastened kind. ”

“ It had come into her mind that for life to be large and full it must contain the care of the past and of the future in every passing moment of the present. Our daily work must be done to the glory of the dead, and for the good of those who come after. ”

“ But may we not go back ages and ages, and yet find Mother Earth preserving for us the story of the past? was she not busy in making the moulds, and taking off the delicate impressions of a chain of life that was not destined to reach to the period of man’s appearance on this globe? ”

“ Why, at the very height of desire and human pleasure,—worldly, social, amorous, ambitious, or even avaricious,—does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a doubt of what is—a retrospect to the past, leading to a prognostication of the future? ”

“ And here is the past—not alone the brazen, threatening present—the past of a strange people, but a people of lovable individuals, who, besides, are brought nearer to us than many of our nearest neighbors by a literature of unparalleled fidelity to life. ”

“ A good portion of my life is already mingled with the past eternity; and, for the future, it is a dim scene, on which my eyes are fixed as calmly and intensely as possible,—to no purpose. The probability of my doing any service in my day and generation is certainly not very strong. ”

“ Now the Past—the joys and sufferings of the men long dead, their efforts, ideals, emotions, nay, their very sensations and temperaments as registered in words or expressed in art, are but another side of the universe, of that universal life, to participate ever deeper in which is the condition of our strength and serenity, the imperious necessity of our ever giving, ever taking soul. ”

“ So that hope and anticipation walked with the bolder pace, inasmuch as memory and retrospection were still their cherished companions. In a word, men's tenacity of the past gave them the larger and brighter vision of the future. ”

“ No past life has been lived to lend us glory, and that which has existed before us is not ours; ”

“ When thou dost wake again to life,
Wilt thou awake to weep?
If thou rememberest aught of past,
Thou mayst perhaps regret
The flowers, and trees, now dead and gone,
And for them mourn e’en yet.
A generation will have passed;
A new one thou wilt greet;
All will be strangers unto thee,
No friend of past thou’lt meet. ”

“ Since the present proves so fleeting,
All the past for you endures;
Weeping at forgotten sorrows,
Smiling at forgotten jokes;
Life epitomized in minutes,
When the old man smokes. —Copyright by Dodd Mead & Co., New York, and used by arrangement. ”

“ One acquires a view of the past that is brief and certain, one resolves with a more valiant and a firmer heart to strike forward on the road once more. And when good wishes and family benedictions fall like soft rain on the soul's intents—Ah! ”

“ Memories that linger o'er the past,
But into softer shadow cast,
Like lovely pictures that recall
One look, but that most dear of all.
When life's more fierce desires depart,
Aware how false and vain they are,—
While youth yet lingers at the heart,
And hope, although it looks afar,—
Then takes the lute, its softest tone,
It murmurs of emotions gone.
Then charms the picture most, it brings
So many unforgotten things.
Then breathes within the gifted scroll
A deeper meaning to the soul,—
For that itself hath learnt before
The truth and secret of its lore. ”

“ No, those sensations seemed to be things of the past, to be things which had righted themselves and grown old, to be things concerning which we needed to trouble ourselves no longer, since, for us, life was about to begin anew. ”

“ That resolve to recapture for the world of to-day a courage and a consecration of which the world of his day was contemptuous, and to devote these invaluable virtues to the opportunities of our time—that is the soul-stirring aim in revivifying the past ”

“ But these faculties, in envisaging the past or the ideal, envisage the eternal, and the man in whose mind they predominate is to that extent detached in his affections from the world of flux, from himself, and from his personal destiny. ”

“ Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future. ”

“ What else remains for me?
EPIMETHEUS. Youth, hope, and love: To build a new life on a ruined life, To make the future fairer than the past, And make the past appear a troubled dream. ”

“ In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life. ”

“ Moreover, my youth is past, and I have gone through experiences and bereavements of which you know nothing, that cause me to set a very slight value on life. I care little whether I die or continue in the world for some few added years. ”

“ But those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear for the future have a life that is very brief and troubled; ”

“ Still, there will be a connection with the long past—a reference to forgotten events and personages, and to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete—which, if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life. ”

“ 'Movement is life;' and it is well to be able to forget the past, and kill the present by continual change. ”

“ They cling their whole life long painfully to the irrevocable past, to the dream of a lost paradise, the worst and most deadly of all dreams. ”

“ This hour will pass—all passes,
On this life's fleeting scene;
But still the future glasses
All that the past has been. ”

“ The great eventful Present hides the Past; but
through the din
Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life
behind steal in; ”

“ Is it not a mistake to imagine that time only flies swiftly with those whose hearts are devoured by mighty schemes, which fret and fever their life? Not an hour sped past the Abbe Troubert but was as animated, as laden with its burden of anxious thought, as lined with pleading hope and deep despair, as could be the most desperate hour of gambler, plotter, or lover. ”

“ But in even the darkest there are bright spots to be found, if we will only search for them; and but for ourselves there would be many more. We look back at the past, and therefore we imagine that it is something shaped of itself into its present aspect.—This is a mistake. We made the past as it is.—We painted the picture—and if it causes pain we alone are to blame. If dark and cheerless, why linger on it? ”

“ The past given to oblivion, the future unanticipated, and the present enjoyed with the full consciousness of its pleasurable existence. Wearied, exhausted, satiated by a boundless indulgence of hackneyed pleasures, hackneyed occupations, hackneyed pursuits, at a moment when I was sinking beneath the lethargic influence of apathy, or hovering on the brink of despair, a new light broke upon my clouded mind, and discovered to my inquiring heart, something yet worth living for. ”

“ There is all this in people, and then there is the past that each one has, his own past, his ancestors, the prodigious combination of actions and of souls of which he is the result. And there is his future, the unexplored desert toward which he stretches out anxious tentacles, and into which I dare to venture, I, the stranger, with trembling heart, the tiny lantern in my hand. ”

“ They will be ever arraying before our eyes the past—the dear, delightful past—happy and beautiful, in mournful contrast with the present, and stirring up, every moment, a thousand secret and tender associations, calculated to shake our constancy. Whenever our eyes do turn to the past, let it be with humble gratitude to God for having allowed us all, in this changing world, so long an interval of happiness ”