Learning From The Past Quotes

“Living is a process of developing oneself. Without experiencing pain from disconcerting periods of our lives, we would be different person, perhaps a lesser person.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Your life is written in indelible ink. There's no going back to erase the past, tweak your mistakes, or fill in missed opportunities. When the moment's over, your fate is sealed.

But if look closer, you notice the ink never really dries on any our experiences. They can change their meaning the longer you look at them.

Klexos.

There are ways of thinking about the past that aren't just nostalgia or regret. A kind of questioning that enriches an experience after the fact. To dwell on the past is to allow fresh context to trickle in over the years, and fill out the picture; to keep the memory alive, and not just as a caricature of itself. So you can look fairly at a painful experience, and call it by its name.

Time is the most powerful force in the universe. It can turn a giant into someone utterly human, just trying to make their way through. Or tell you how you really felt about someone, even if you couldn't at the time. It can put your childhood dreams in context with adult burdens or turn a universal consensus into an embarrassing fad. It can expose cracks in a relationship that once seemed perfect. Or keep a friendship going by thoughts alone, even if you'll never see them again. It can flip your greatest shame into the source of your greatest power, or turn a jolt of pride into something petty, done for the wrong reasons, or make what felt like the end of the world look like a natural part of life.

The past is still mostly a blank page, so we may be doomed to repeat it. But it's still worth looking into if it brings you closer to the truth.

Maybe it's not so bad to dwell in the past, and muddle in the memories, to stem the simplification of time, and put some craft back into it. Maybe we should think of memory itself as an art form, in which the real work begins as soon as the paint hits the canvas. And remember that a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.”
― John Koenig

“Will this generation be able to turn things around and learn a valuable lesson from all of this? I hope so, but I have my doubts. The damage has been done. And as a lifelong student of history, it's quite evident that human beings don't learn from the mistakes of past generations.”
― Aaron B. Powell, Voluntary

“Even a spineless anthropod sheds what's no longer useful and leaves it behind them. Are you not greater than they?”
― Jason Versey

“Without making mistakes, there won't be lessons learned. Without getting hurt, there won't be knowledge gained. The only way we grow is by learning from the past. Always be willing to learn and grow daily. It's how we come to know who we are and what we are made of.”
― Kemi Sogunle

“Examination of our past is never time-wasting. Reverberations from the past provide learning rubrics for living today.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. Ideas derived from real world experiences lead to acquisition of knowledge, and the accumulation of time-tested principles leads to wisdom.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“What ultimately got me through was my single-minded determination, voiced aloud to myself and recorded in my diary, to discover the causes of my blindness and never to repeat them. Fearlessly pursuing insight was my badge of honor, my route back to self-respect.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“Take care not to welcome today the terrors that will make yesterday's demons look like angels.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“There is more than one road to spiritual salvation. We discover a philosophical way of living by encountering the world, culling knowledge from all available resources, and thinking reverently about life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“I cannot shun the past because it contains information that is useful to script future goals. Looking back into the opaque window of reductive retrospect, what essential opportunities exist today that beckon one to seek with unrestrained enthusiasm? What iridescent signals flare from our conceptual self that if we heedlessly ignore their luminous summons, such deliberate acts of omission will suture the apex of our souls, relegating us to the dreaded curse of mucking along in an ordinary life stalled out by our overweening fear of estrangement?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Each of us wages a private battle to thrive. Whenever a person fully immerses oneself in life’s aromatic flower garden of pleasures and encounters life’s warship of armor-plated rigors, they blend and bend to make reasonable accommodations for surviving. Scripted and unscripted encounters with superior militant forces bruise us mightily and eventually cut us to the core. Every person’s life contains a minefield of obstacles that function as potential barriers to achieving our ultimate manifestation. The expended labor of continuously hefting oneself over one contentious hurdle after another is what leads a conscientious person onto the path of needing to write in order to create emotional poultices to ameliorate painful wounds.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“We are born with the innate capacity to express empathy. Experiencing our own cuts and bruises, encountering our own difficulties and disappointments, expands our cognitive world and rouses the universal desire to understand and comfort other people in pain.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“. . . I've learned over the years that if more people knew more about history, our world would be a better place. History is constantly speaking to us. Travelers enjoy a privileged way to hear it—and sometimes an up-close chance to witness history in the making.”
― Rick Steves, For the Love of Europe: My Favorite Places, People, and Stories

“If you accuse others for your mistakes, you will learn nothing from your mistakes.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“885 Looking at the past to lament it is useless. Looking at the past to be proud of results is dangerous. Looking at the past to learn from it is wise.”
― François-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận, The Road of Hope: A Gospel from Prison

“You learn a great deal from pain than you will ever learn from pleasures.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Learn from history, maintain your mystery, take your victory.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Everything I need to know about our past has been recorded in these old books. If I am to rule one day, then I must be educated on the ways of the world and our history. I can't bring prosperity to these lands if I don't understand the mistakes we made that got us here today. I need to be capable of planning new ways to bring in the coin, the resources, and the people.”
― Larry Dean Toler II, Fates: A Dark Legacy

“In Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as "the younger brothers of Creation". We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn - we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They've been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

“Every encounter I have, whether it be a struggle or a blessing, is like a star. A single piece of my life. All the things–the things I see, the things I feel, the things I experience–they are my little stars. Each a speck of light. And I gather all these stars together, and I keep them forever near me.”
― Laura Rollins, A Pocket of Stars