We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.

We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with read more

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

Listen to the Water-Mill:
Through the live-long day
How the clicking of its wheel
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Listen to the Water-Mill:
Through the live-long day
How the clicking of its wheel
Wears the hours away!
Languidly the Autumn wind
Stirs the forest leaves,
From the field the reapers sing
Binding up their sheaves:
And a proverb haunts my mind
As a spell is cast,
"The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past."

O, to bring back the great Homeric time,
The simple manners and the deed sublime:
When the read more

O, to bring back the great Homeric time,
The simple manners and the deed sublime:
When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate,
Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

But how carve way i' the life that lies before,
If bent on groaning ever for the past?

But how carve way i' the life that lies before,
If bent on groaning ever for the past?

Nostalgia is a seductive liar.

Nostalgia is a seductive liar.

Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of
romance is dead. The age of read more

Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of
romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past so long as
there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.