Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

I love my friends and my past, and it’s made me who I am.

If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

I had rather be first in a village than second at Rome.

Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.

Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

I don’t dislike any of my exes. If I took time to form a relationship, it’s gonna hurt when we move on, but are you puttin‘ White-Out over all that beautiful time together? That was real time in your life. It’s connected to where you are today.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

The three most powerful and most apparent means used by Rome to retain her power over the minds of her votaries are Ignorance, Superstition, and Persecution.

I was adored once too.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

Men who think that a woman’s past love affairs lessen her love for them are usually stupid and weak.

Fashion is inspired by youth and nostalgia and draws inspiration from the best of the past.

If I’m in Rome for only 48 hours, I would consider it a sin against God to not eat cacio e pepe, the most uniquely Roman of pastas, in some crummy little joint where Romans eat. I’d much rather do that than go to the Vatican. That’s Rome to me.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

Anywhere I go, there is always an incredible crowd that follows me. In Rome, as I land at the airport, even the men kiss me. I love Rome.

Liverpool is a club with a big, big, big history, and all the clubs in the world have a big history if the present is not too successful. If you have never had success, then nobody knows how it is, but in Liverpool, everybody knows how it was.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

I’m very proud of the Rome episode of ‚No Reservations‘ because it violated all the conventional wisdom about making television. You’re never, ever supposed to do a food or travel show in black and white.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

They say miracles are past.

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

What is past is prologue.

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

In the good old days when I was a senator, I was my own man.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

In this bright future you can’t forget your past.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we’re going forward to tomorrow or whether we’re going to go past to the – to the back!

The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

There’s no present. There’s only the immediate future and the recent past.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

Once I knew only darkness and stillness… my life was without past or future… but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‚security,‘ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists – they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.

The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge – the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever.