Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.

future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.

"That old?" The old man sighed. "History has been crowded since."

Life, as he conceived of it, was a long decline from a glorious past, and if a reader approaches a newspaper in that spirit, he can find much to confirm him in his belief, particularly if he has never examined any short period of the past in day-to-day detail.

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

The future for me is already a thing of the past.

As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons.

It is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness.

The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes.

God seems to have disappeared from the horizon, and his word no longer seems a compass guiding our lives, our basic decisions, our human and social relationships.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.