We approach every event of life, every happening with the past, with a memory, with all the knowledge of yesterday, with its pleasures, pains, fears and hopes. We meet every happening through that, through the past, and so we are never directly in contact with anything. We are always in contact with the past, and that is what meets the present, which creates contradiction and therefore effort and fear.
From Public Talk 2, Paris, 20 May 1965