times

Wisdom lies not in regretting the inevitable but in adapting oneself to the altered condition of things.

- Saddlery and Harness magazine, 1895

The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

- William Gibson

It is not given to human beings - happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable - to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events.

- Winston Churchill

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

- Mike Tyson

Dreams are maps.

- Carl Sagan

Past years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable at a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it.

- Beryl Markham

Grief for something lost and fear of losing it amount to the same thing.

- Seneca

Happy are the people whose annals are blank in history books.

- Montesquieu

Happiness leaves little trace in history.

- Fernand Braudel

No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

You cannot step in the same river twice.

- Greek proverb

En toute chose il faut considérer la fin.

- Jean de La Fontaine

When the sun stands at midday, it begins to set. When the moon is full, it begins to wane. The fullness and emptiness of heaven and earth wane and wax in the course of time. How much truer is this of men, or of spirits and gods!

- Confucian commentary on the Book of Changes

Such as thou art, so once was I. As I am now, so shalt thou be.

- Edward the Black Prince

Another time it will be like this again, another time things will be the same, some time, some place. What happened a long time ago and which no longer happens, will be again as it was in far off times.

- Mexica proverb

What the dead had no speech for when living, they can tell you, being dead. The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

- T. S. Elliot

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

- William Faulkner

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose.

- Ecclesiastes

History is fate.

- David Halberstam

All efforts against the prevailing trend of history - which is not always obvious - are doomed to failure.

- Fernand Braudel

The longer you look back, the farther you can look forward.

- Winston Churchill

Seekers of lost glories must be grateful even for crumbs.

- Scott Weidensaul

The spiritual estate of man is so enormous and so inexhaustible in its diversity that only he who stands on the shoulders of great predecessors can utter a truly new and weighty word.

- Leon Trotsky

A lag stretches between the happenings of a historical process and it’s recognition.

- Barbara Tuchman

In every great turning point in history, the preconditions and causes reach far back into the past.

- Jonathan Israel

Memory is not disinterested. Not rarely it suppresses or relegates to an obscure corner episodes which go against the grain.

- Leon Trotsky

All wars are fought twice. The first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

- Viet Thanh Nguyen

It is a trap of history to believe that eyewitnesses remember accurately what they have lived through.

- Theodore White

The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.

- Pat Buchanan

It is not our mind that masters the great events. On the contrary the events arising from a combination, interplay, and concatenation of great objective historical forces compel our sluggish, lazy mind waddlingly and limpingly to adjust itself.

- Leon Trotsky

Everyday we get a front seat to history.

- John H. White

Journalism is the first rough draft of history.

- Philip Graham

Dissent is the way the voice of prophecy is first heard.

- Irving Dilliard

As we see them change, so we see how we became who we are.

- E. P. Thompson

History is an argument without end.

- Pieter Geyl