Are you looking for inspirational quotes about the past? Inspiring Lizard has got you covered! In this article we present the 993 most beautiful the past quotes we could find. Let’s get inspired!
The past quotes
Because of the past, so many people are living in the past! No one is free from the past, but we are free to choose to move from the past into the present or stay in the past, though we live in the present!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present. I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again.
— Lisa Bu
I didn’t want to come off arrogant or conceited, or basically how I’ve been acting the past year, year and a half … although what’s happened in the past has happened, I just want to … be kind and loving and gentle and soft.
— Justin Bieber
If Time travel were possible, the future would have already taught the present to teach the past how to do it.
— Atom Tate
I’ve learned to appreciate what I’ve got. I’m not going to waste an ounce of energy on sorting through the past or with worrying about the future. Life’s too short for that.
— Chris Coppernoll, A Beautiful Fall
Learn from the past but don’t forget to live for the present moment. This moment is your life.
— Debasish Mridha
Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
He lived a quiet existence where the future was easy to predict and the past was a cancer in remission. It was meaningful, of course. But it was lonely.
— Adelheid Manefeldt, Consequence
There is no present or future only the past happening over and over again now.
— Eugene O’Neill
I cannot let the fear of the past color the future.
— Julie Kagawa, The Eternity Cure
…before you, life was desolate – the past hardly worth remembering – and now, each moment a keepsake I can’t throw away …
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Although I think of myself as the greatest heavyweight, I do respect the legends of the past for what they did. But they are not my heroes.
— Tyson Fury
In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing–the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.
— May Sarton, At Seventy: A Journal
History is not another name for the past as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.
— A. J. P. Taylor
There’s an old saying about those who cannot remember the past being condemned to repeat it. But those of us who refuse to forget the past are condemned to relive it.
— Emily Thorne
Time becomes meaningless without memory and we humans have a unique consciousness that allows us to live in the past or the future, which is actually more of a curse than a useful superpower.
— Jon Edgell, Resolution
Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works
— Munia Khan
… despite the profound advances in molecular biology oer the past half-century, we still do not understand what life is, how it relates to the inanimate world, and how it emerged.
— Addy Pross, What is Life?: How chemistry becomes biology
One must never lose time in vainly regretting the past or in complaining against the changes which cause us discomfort for change is the essence of life.
— Anatole France
Bring up the past only if it will help to build the future, otherwise its best to be left to sleep
— Tahir M Khan
In the past the man has been first in the future the system must be first… The first object of any good system must be that of developing first class men.
— Frederick W. Taylor
Goals for the future distract from worry and anger about the past and redirect your focus to the direction you’re travelling in.
— Sam Owen, 500 Relationships And Life Quotes: Bite-Sized Advice For Busy People
Regrets are a waste of time. They’re the past crippling the present.- From Under the Tuscan Sun, 2003
— Movie Quote
Knowledge in the Internet Age – networked knowledge – is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it’s provisional it’s a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved.
— David Weinberger
Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn’t exist in the present here and now.
— Marina Abramovic
It’s when I have to acknowledge the past and all of those nameless, faceless people I’d assassinated, that I unravel inside.
— Cheyenne McCray, The First Sin
You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.
— Leopold Von Ranke
Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
— George Eliot
What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.
— Victor Hugo
Only those with whom you have bound karmic accounts, in the past life, will be able to live with you together.
— Dada Bhagwan
The memory of the past did not redeem the future, as he insisted on believing.
— Gabriel García Márquez
The future, when it comes, is just like the present. The present is all you have and the opportunity of the present is worth more than the success of the past or the promise of the future.
— William J. Reilly, How to Avoid Work
Regard for the past only extends to its outward forms.
— Henrik Bering
Kiss away the past as you head towards the future.
— Imania Margria
Life is all about Re-Inventing Yourself, so that you can rejoice every moment, just un-learn and let-go of the past and no sooner you do it, you stay afresh and are born again!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
Yanked out of the present, Adam discovered the richness of the past in people’s stories.
— Randy Alcorn, Courageous
The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years.
— Walter A. McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585-1828
He continued to see inevitable events from the past as avoidable, long after they’d taken their course.
— Hugh Howey, Wool Omnibus
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
— Alan W. Watts
Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future
— Maxim Gorky, Twenty-Six Men and a Girl and Other Stories
I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate.
— Arthur Wing Pinero
He loved me.Noah Hutchins had told me he loved me, and that had made the past week at school absolute hell.
— Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
Maybe he was going to hell. Except, he could’ve sworn that was where he’d been the past ten years.
— Kelly Moran, Return to Me
Your accomplishments in the past and present has a link to your future success.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Living in the past has one thing in its favour – it’s cheaper.
— Old saying
Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.
— Ted Chiang, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate
Every morning I read the obituaries. If it ain’t there I make myself a cup of tea and carry on like I have the past century or so.
— Lois Greiman, One Hot Mess
Yet I have come to believe that while the past is unchangeable, our perceptions of is are malleable…
— Nicholas Sparks, The Wedding
Remembering to forget the past allows you freedom from a past that holds back your Christian growth.
— Elizabeth George
They were of the past, and the past always mends itself, no matter how me interfere.
— Ransom Riggs, Hollow City
To enjoy the beauty of life, live profoundly in the present moment without the fear of the past or future.
— Debasish Mridha
The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind.
— Thomas Hobbes
There’s just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can’t know it all, and that’s where imagination can work.
— Geraldine Brooks
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
— Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry
The same undisciplined government spending and social engineering that has undermined our economy over the past 30 years has also been tearing at the social fabric of this land.
— Stockwell Day
I have come face to face with many truths from the past that had to be revised with present knowledge.
— Jeffrey Fry
If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God.
— Pope Francis
Today you are no longer a victor nor victim of the past and future, today is completely independent, there are no restrictions; except for the ones you place upon yourself.
— Noel DeJesus
Don’t be ruled by your past. Don’t be crippled by the past. Let the past be the past and focus on what is ahead. Remember however that if you neglect the most essential lessons of the past, you shall walk into the future with one leg.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
I knew it was foolhardy; men of experience say, “Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity
— Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
If I wanted to be free of this unrequited longing, I would have to make peace with the past and finally let go. There was no way around it. But did I want to be free of it – and him?
— Kat Von D., Go Big or Go Home: Taking Risks in Life, Love, and Tattooing
Time that is spent dwelling on the past will surely continue in your present moment – and the future.
— Michelle Cruz-Rosado
When I look at the multitude of the gods of the past held in esteem by great civilisations now cast aside as pagan idols, I wonder wether tomorrow the gods we hold in high esteem won’t suffer the same fate.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana
Parents are like shuttles on a loom. They join the threads of the past with threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go.
— Fred Rogers
What you did in the past is your business. Those were your choices—your mistakes—if you even believe they were mistakes. Stop caring what anyone thinks and live your life the way you want to live it.
— Laura Wright, Eternal Kiss
In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred, It is a paryer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present.
— Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, The Shapeshifters: The Kiesha’ra of the Den of Shadows
Looking repeatedly into the past you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life but rather with the phenomenon of memory.
— Patricia Hampl
Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Reappraise the past reevaluate where we’ve been clarify where we are and predict or anticipate where we are headed.
— Toni Cade Bambara
Where does the past go when it changes?
— Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Reputations
At times, it’s better to think of exactly what is happening right in front of you every second, rather than going through things from the past in your mind.
— Nancy E. Turner, Sarah’s Quilt
You have to know the past to understand the present.
— Carl Sagan
The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel’s spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future.
— Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel
So far as I am aware no leader of a party of the European left in the past twenty-five years has declared capitalism as such to be unacceptable as a system. The only public figure to do so unhesitatingly was Pope John Paul II.
— Eric Hobsbawm
For most of the people there is no today and there is no tomorrow; for them, there is only the past times! Leave your past to live your today and to live your tomorrow!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.
— David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames
No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.
— Theodore Bikel
You may have some scars from the past but this will fade away in time.
— Abegail O. Salazar
This is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for the future that only He can see.
— Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place
Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.
— Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.
— Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
The ashes of the past drift away on the winds of the future. ~ Ryan Mark, Author
— Ryan Mark
As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future –a terrible festival of dead leaves.
— Anna Akhmatova, Poems of Akhmatova
Anniversaries are like birthdays: occasions to celebrate and to think ahead, usually among friends with whom one shares not only the past but also the future.
— Zbigniew Brzezinski
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
— Alan W. Watts
If the past was what we were meant to see…then behind, not in front, our eyes would be.
— RVM
I’ve been allowed to grow over the past twenty years. I’ve managed to avoid being trapped in one moment of my career and for that, I’m very thankful.
— Giovanni Ribisi
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
— George Orwell, 1984
We can pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
— John Buchan
The flesh endures the storms of the present alone the mind those of the past and future as well.
— Epicurus
We study the past ecological history, with the conscience of the present ecological conditions. The key to predict future aquatic ecosystem changes.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
I never stopped loving her, ” he said. “I couldn’t let her go. Once the past gets you in its clutches, well, you’ve got to want to fight to be released. I never did. That was my mistake.
— Emylia Hall, The Book of Summers
Time is an illusion of life the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present.
— Leo Tolstoy
Any blunder committed in the past opens the avenue for the success of the future. However, the success of the future massively is fueled by the how positively the mistakes of the past are handled!
— Israelmore Ayivor, Daily Drive 365
To excel the past we must not allow ourselves to lose contact with it on the contrary we must feel it under our feet because we raised ourselves upon it.
— Josi Ortega y Gasset
I don’t dwell in the past I just can’t forget what’s passed.
— Nigar Siddiqui
To be truly happy, a man must live absolutely in the present, no thought of what’s gone before and no thought of what lies ahead. But a life with meaning, a man is condemned to wallow in the past and obsess about the future.
— Daniel Linderman
Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.
— Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering
Preservation of the past has been one of humankind’s chief preoccupations for centuries, although I am not convinced much of it is worth preserving.
— Chris Flynn
Look to the past to see what the future holds.
— Celia Conrad, Wilful Murder
I’m afraid that the gift of visiting the past is all that we have. We can revisit it, but only as it happened.
— Karen Essex, Dracula in Love
Much of history is fragmentary and essentially anachronistic – condemning the past for not being more like the present. It has no real interest in the pastness of the past.
— Gordon S. Wood
I don’t carry the burden of the past or the madness of the future. I live in the present.
— Narendra Modi
For the past two years, President Obama has promised our children the moon, stars, rainbows, unicorns and universal health care for all. But the White House Santa’s cradle-to-grave entitlement mandates are a spectacularly predictable bust.
— Michelle Malkin
That was a thing of wolves; they could know the past and the future, yet keep their attention on the hunt. Could he do the same? Allow himself to be consumed when needed, yet keep balance in other parts of his life?
— Robert Jordan, Towers of Midnight
The integrity of one’s own mind is of infinitely more value than adherence to any creed or system. We must choose between a dead faith belonging to the past and a living, growing ever-advancing science belonging to the future.
— Luther Burbank
To be a success, let go of the past and accept the beauty of change.
— Debasish Mridha
All that matters is this moment and what you make of it, because the past is history and the future is just full of wishes that you can’t foresee.
— Austin V. Songer
Samsa certainly had no idea what lay ahead. He was in the dark about everything: the future, of course, but the present and the past as well . What was right, and what was wrong? Just learning how to dress was a riddle.
— Haruki Murakami, Samsa in Love
Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.
— Jeanette Winterson
The present becomes the past instantaneously. Look back by all means but remember that you’re moving forward.
— Terry Lander, Alf & Mabel
Ego is the central figure of our personal history, based upon the past and looking into the future. Ego is the deepest dream of the Consciousness.
— Frank Wanderer
Dwelling on the past is like dragging a boat over dry land.
— Sheila M. Burke, Enriched Heart: The Tao of Balancing Your Big, Beautiful, Badass Soul
Critical voices have to care about history. We have to care about the way in which things get controlled in the past because that’s when the damage gets done and if we don’t keep that historical memory, we will allow them to do it again next time.
— Martin Baker
Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.
— Frederick Jackson Turner
It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.
— Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World
Remember, the past need not become our future as well.
— Brandon Sanderson, Elantris
The challenge is to draw on the past but not be bound by it” p. 20
— David Brazzeal, Pray Like a Gourmet: Creative Ways to Feed Your Soul
‘Caught’ is a novel of forgiveness, and the past and the present – who should be and who shouldn’t be forgiven. None of my books are ever just about thrills, or it won’t work.
— Harlan Coben
Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.
— Stephen King, Doctor Sleep
all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.
— Truman Capote
The reason for the past is only revealed in the future.
— Kamand Kojouri
All things fell into the past but one; and what that was, was love.
— Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors
Please don’t let the unhappiness you knew in the past keep you from accepting happiness now.
— Susan Meissner, Secrets of a Charmed Life
Starting over is an acceptance of a past we can’t change, an unrelenting conviction that the future can be different, and a stubborn wisdom to use the past to make the future was the past was not.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
It has been said that though God cannot alter the past historians can – it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
— Samuel Butler
Life is divided into three parts: what was, what is and what shall be. Of these three periods, the present is short, the future is doubtful and the past alone is certain.
— Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
Alessandra approached the geniuses of the past to give them life with her attention, which was the form her affection took: paying attention.
— Carlos Fuentes, Todas las familias felices
Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realised that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.
— J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
Memory is that element in our consciousness that connects the past with the present. If we had no memory, there would be only one moment of our life, the moment we call now, and we would never consciously recognize more than this single moment.
— Gustaf Stromberg
For basic survival, as for evolution, we have to accept the past as the creator of the present, influence the future, and act in the present.
— Daniel Egger, Future Value Generation: Do you need to create new Business Logics?
Because they’re my stories, they’re my version of events of the past three years. But I really hope people can hear their own stories within the songs and they can become our version of events.
— Emeli Sande
I think my attitudes about the past are very traditional. You can’t ignore history; you can’t escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.
— Frank Gehry
Learning from the past can helpyou move forward. Lingering inthe past will only hold you back.
— Domonique Bertolucci
Live for the present, as the past has gone and the future as yet to arrive.
— LadyTiara
One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory.
— Jorge Luis Borges
In books too, as well as in music, she courted the misery which a contrast between the past and present was certain of giving.
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.
— George S. Patton
I thought of the past and how one should have respect for it, like the elderly.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There’d Be Cake
One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
— Golda Meir, My Life
The future for me is already a thing of the past -You were my first love and you will be my last
— Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan – Love and Theft: Piano/Vocal/Guitar
Stay More’ is synonymous with ‘Status Quo’ in fact, there are people who believe, or who like to believe, that the name of the town was intended as an entreaty, beseeching the past to remain present.
— Donald Harington, The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks
You must not allow the hurt of the past to haunt or hinder you from fulfilling and performing your duties as one who has a passion to impact his society and make a change.
— Sunday Adelaja, The Mountain of Ignorance
It doesn’t matter how bitter or better the past has been, what we can do with the bitter or better past today is what matters.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, Religion, Philosophy and life
I try to learn from the past but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That’s where the fun is.
— Donald Trump
The future is the past in preparation.
— Pierre Dae
You’re the one person whose opinion I care about. When I’m with you, the past dissappears, and I’m a better person.
— Cindi Madsen, All the Broken Pieces
A nation is a body of people who have done great things together in the past and hope to do great things together in the future.
— Frank Underhill
I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.
— John Fowles, The Magus
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.
— Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
I believe that life is written out for you, it maps out your life to make you happy, but what I’ve been living for the past four years is my unwritten life…
— Amy Shannon, Unwritten Life
All great composers of the past spent most of their time studying. Feeling alone won’t do the job. A man also needs technique.
— George Gershwin
And in the eveningAfter the fire and the lightOne thing is certain: Nothing can hold back the lightTime is relentlessAnd as the past disappearsWe’re on the verge of all things new
— Billy Joel, Billy Joel – River of Dreams
Learn from the past but use the present to create the future.
— Auliq Ice
The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.
— Marcel Pagnol
If you want to fly on the sky, you need to leave the earth. If you want to move forward, you need to let go the past that drags you down.
— Amit Ray, World Peace: The Voice of a Mountain Bird
You have a choice. Take hold of your future or the past will take it for you.
— Pepper D. Basham
Don’t let the guilt of the past keep you from the victories of the future.
— Todd Stocker, Refined: Turning Pain Into Purpose
I’ve done so much travelling in the past few years, and when you travel, you realise that we do actually have a cool, clean look in Scandinavia – it’s not just Denmark – which I think brings peace if you have it in your home.
— Birgitte Hjort Sorensen
America is a great country. We have a lot to be proud of, and a lot to look forward to being proud of. But let’s not ever forget to look back into the past, learn from it, and embrace it, for to deny the past is a dark path to go down.
— Lauren Lola, An Absolute Mind
Just because you’re done with the past doesn’t mean the past is done with you.
— Paul Doiron, The Bone Orchard
You can’t let the past ruin your future, I changed over in my mind.
— Maria V. Snyder, Storm Glass
He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don’t exist.
— Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness
You have blotted out the past for me, you know, far more effectively than all the bright lights of Monte Carlo. But for you I should have left long ago, gone to Italy, and Greece, and further still perhaps. You have spared me all those wanderings.
— Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
No matter how much you stress or obsess about the past or future, you can’t change either one. In the present is where your power lies.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
It’s a pleasure to share one’s memories. Everything remembered is dear endearing touching precious. At least the past is safe-though we didn’t know it at the time. We know it now. Because it’s in the past because we have survived.
— Susan Sontag
Empty your life from the baggage of the past so you may enjoy the beauty of the present.
— Debasish Mridha
We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re 10. … Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
It is difficult to live in and enjoy the moment when you are thinking about the past or worrying about the future.
— Roy Bennett
You can not change the past but you can change the future.
— Immortal Technique
To a father, when a child dies, the future dies; to a child when a parent dies, the past dies.
— Red Auerbach
It’s painful when the phantom of the past keeps on lingering you even you wanted to move on.
— Kenneth C. Agudo
She absorbed the terror and beauty of him and his world. Of every moment over the past days. All of it, filling her up like the first breath she’d ever taken. And never had she loved life more.
— Veronica Rossi, Under the Never Sky
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
People are powerfully moved by imagination, belief, and knowledge. They can consider the past and future. They can make changes in their behavior out of reason in a way that animals can’t do.
— Gretchen Rubin
In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection.
— Andrei Tarkovsky
Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
You can’t look back – you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.
— Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls
In Western culture, the ‘miracles’ referenced in scripture seem to have been relegated to the past as if to imply that they were reserved exclusively for certain historical periods.
— Mark Ireland, Messages from the Afterlife: A Bereaved Father’s Journey in the World of Spirit Visitations, Psychic-Mediums, and Synchronicity
The future needed service, not pity, not piety; but in the past lay darkness, confusion, waste, and all the cramped primitive minds, bewildered, torturing one another in their stupidity, yet one and all in some unique manner, beautiful.
— Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
Learning from the past helps to ensure that mistakes are not repeated.
— Monica Johnson
We can see well into the past we can guess shrewdly in to the future but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I believe that this neglected wounded inner child of the past is the major source of human misery.
— John Bradshaw
If you’re going to make the past your present, be prepared for a lifetime of dust …
— Lily Graham, The Cornish Escape
The error of the past is the success of the future. A mistake is evidence that someone tried to do something.
— Anonymous
I wish we’d be able to deliver our message at the global level on the need to recognize the past genocides in order to prevent new ones. Our message of peace and justice will hopefully reach every corner of the world.
— Widad Akreyi
Don’t stare at the past or you’ll walk right by today’s opportunity. Today is God’s gift to you.
— Benjamin Lotter
The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful…
— Henri Bergson
What is at the base of shame or guilt? It is the consciousness of an imbalance, or of an action in the past that has caused, and probably continues to cause, suffering.
— Darrell Calkins
Our specious present as such is very short. We do, however, experience passing events; part of the process of the passage of events is directly there in our experience, including some of the past and some of the future.
— George Herbert Mead
My happiness with the future and the present depends on my ability to let the past go and make peace with it.
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
[O]urs is a culture of the perpetual present, one that deliberately severs itself from the past that created us as well as the future we are shaping with our actions.
— Naomi Klein
If I were you I’d put that away. See you’re just wasted and thinking about the past again, darling you’ll be okay.
— Pierce the Veil
Living in the past is a place that has no future.
— Jeffrey Fry
Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.
— Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Forget the past – the future will give you plenty to worry about.
— George Allen, Sr.
Writers are never fully present because they’re always imagining a different version of the way things are happening; imagining the past in a different way, imagining the present in a different way, imagining the future in a different way.
— Jessica Soffer
How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.
— Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
You have no future when the past rules you.
— Sara Sheridan, Truth Or Dare
The task ahead of us will be extremely challenging as the Tory party continue with their austerity agenda and as we continue to resolve the issues of the past and build unity, reconciliation, and equality.
— Martin McGuinness
If anybody tries to penetrate the past with the knife of the present will always act in vain. The past is invulnerable. Such attempts can only cause the present or the future to bleed.” – Gregor Brand
— Simon Schwartz
After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?
— Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter
The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.
— Alfred North Whitehead
Sweet as the past may be, it best remains pressed between the pages of memory, savoured for a moment or two on quiet Sunday afternoons.
— Indu Muralidharan, The Reengineers
If the past could be changed, it would not exist. If the future could be stopped, it would not survive. If the present could be avoided, it would not prevail.
— Matshona Dhliwayo
Great architecture of the past was always clear. SFMOMA is still a simple building to understand.
— Mario Botta
During the past one year who has inspired you the most?
— Byrappa, Question Yourself
Enjoy the present hour Be thankful for the past And neither fear nor wish Th’ approaches of the last.
— Abraham Cowley
It is impossible to be creative if you live in the past or the future. To practice the discipline of keeping our consciousness in present time allows our full ability to manifest all physical matter through the power of thought”.
— Meryl Yvonne, Closer to Death, Closer to God: True Stories of a Spiritual Awakening
I have been happier in the past week than I ever imagined possible and it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the money. You’re the real prize. The lottery was just a bonus.
— Amanda Young, Windfall
I go backwards and forwards, recapturing the past, wondering about the future—and, most unreasonably, I find myself longing for the past more than for the future.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
Why should I forget the past experienced? I can only let go of the pain.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
One could only learn from the past and move on through the present to make a better future.
— Jason Medina, The Diary of Audrey Malone Frayer
Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Look into my eyes andYou’ll see my mind.A tranquil city, That rebuilt itself and left the past behind.
— Innocent Mwatsikesimbe, This Is My Life
Confidence now, in the past and it will continue to be the mankind problem!
— Deyth Banger
When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.
— Aberjhani, Collected Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black
Forget the past and live the present hour.
— Sarah Knowles Bolton
In some ways, we are traveling in time now. We just happened to be prisoners of the present in the eternal transition from the past to the future.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I’ll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least thing I say.
— Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories
Thomas had lived in fear and terror the past few weeks, but this was almost too much. To feel safe only to have that snatched away again.
— James Dashner, The Scorch Trials
Boys have said in the past that I live my life like a movie. I love all things romantic, like kissing in the rain.
— Mollie King
The one who forgives never brings up the past to that person’s face. When you forgive, it’s like it never happened. True forgiveness is complete and total.
— Louis Zamperini, Devil at My Heels
Your life is happening in the NOW, yet the present moment is often squandered by your thinking about what has happened in the past or may happen in the future.
— Susan C. Young, The Art of Action: 8 Ways to Initiate & Activate Forward Momentum for Positive Impact
It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research.
— Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
I always found it so ironic, how the people from the past would do anything to see what happened everywhere else in the world that they lost so much of their own life watching this little screen.
— Silje Jensen
We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.
— Alfred North Whitehead
The Importance of Using Time Well How pleasant it is at the end of the day No follies to have to repent But reflect on the past and be able to say That my time has been properly spent.
— Ann Taylor
We cannot keep on blaming the past leaders about the present circumstances. We need to be mindful that if we do nothing to improve the present circumstances, our children will also blame us in the future.
— Gugu Mona
I just don’t see why the past has to matter.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels
It’s who you is when folks knocks at the door of your heart what counts. Hide the past and it gives them what’s jealous of you the power to bring you undone.
— Bryce Courtenay
Each age selects its own geniuses from the past to suit its own needs. It’s always been that way.
— Seb Kirby, Take No More
Forgiving yourself means that you give up on your hope that the past will be different.
— Edward M. Hallowell, Dare to Forgive: The Power of Letting Go & Moving on
We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action.
— Learned Hand
What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.
— George Orwell, 1984
Files of the past can be changed through shock, encouragement or pain
— Sunday Adelaja
I forced my eyes open and saw the image that’s haunted me every day for the past years of my life. And every day, in my nightmares.
— Liz Thebart, Walk Away
She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past.
— Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I don’t see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
It takes leadership to improve safety. And I started off the movement in my time, but the person who has done more over the past 20 to 30 years and who has led it is Professor Sid Watkins.
— Jackie Stewart
Even with, or perhaps, because of, this background, I have over the past few years sensed a very dramatic change in attitude on the part of Prince Edward Islanders towards the on-going rush for so-called modernization.
— Alex Campbell
For the past 32 years, I’ve done nothing outside the entertainment business. I’ve had some real highs and some real lows, but I love the work so much that I never once thought of quitting.
— Meat Loaf
I’ve done nothing for the past five years but try to be the hero who protects her. The problem? Heroines don’t need protecting.
— Colleen Hoover, Maybe Someday
You don’t rewrite it, censor it, or edit it, to suit some warped view you have of the past and your own present.
— V.T. Davy, Black Art
At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
If you don’t deal with the past, the past deals with you.
— Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, Gone
He who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it.
— Paul Christopher, The Lucifer Gospel
Forgiveness is a process of accepting the past and welcoming the mysterious beauty of the future.
— Debasish Mridha
Because it happened in the past , doesn’t mean it forgotten …!!
— Doha Asrir
The skeletons of the past must not hold back the dream of a new life, even though fear and regret, guilt and remorse may unsettle us during the effort to give our future a new home. (“Into a new life”)
— Erik Pevernagie
There are only two things to understand in this world. First is, one’s own True Self, and the other is, our faults from the past [life]. Won’t these faults have to be broken?
— Dada Bhagwan
Secrets of the past! Who does not wish to keep the past locked in a cage like a ferocious beast? The rich are sleepless for fear of thieves. The respectable have to guard their reputations in the same way.
— Munshi Premchand
Mantras are the past & the future.
— David R. Wommack
I believe that this neglected wounded inner child of the past is the major source of human misery.
— John Bradshaw
I’m not much for sitting around and thinking about the past or talking about the past. What does that accomplish? If I can give young people something to think about, like the future, that’s a better use of my time.
— Arnold Palmer
One of my greatest lessons of growth was to stop dwelling in the past and forgive myself and others from all the pain and hurt that was caused. When I finally let go and released, I was free with glee.
— Jason Micheal Ratliff
Maybe the problem with holding onto memories so tightly is that they don’t allow us to make room for the future. Maybe the gentle decay of the past is a blessing that dulls the sharp blade of regret, allowing the possibility of rebirth.
— Ryan Galloway, Biome
Have you noticed, ” she asked him, “how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?
— Mary Balogh, Simply Magic
Each time you allow the past to hold your future, [he] steals more and more from you.
— Pepper D. Basham
As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply: ‘Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.
— Robert Smithson
Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.
— Euripides
It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast betweenthe standards of the past and the standards of the present. Somefulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.
— Norman Davies, Europe
When the past comes knocking, don’t answer. It has nothing new to tell you.
— Auliq Ice
Peaceful is he who is living in the moment, but not in the past nor in the future.
— Debasish Mridha
Be satisfied and pleased with what thou art Act cheerfully and well thou allotted part Enjoy the present hour be thankful for the past And neither fear nor wish the approaches of the last.
— Martial
As long as Simon didn’t think about the past, the past couldn’t hurt him. But, increasingly, he couldn’t help himself.There was too much pleasure in the pain.
— Cassandra Clare, The Evil We Love
While good old-fashioned manners and etiquette have worked for centuries, new standards and expectations have come into play with the modern world. Behaviors which would have been appalling in the past are now socially acceptable.
— Susan C. Young, The Art of Action: 8 Ways to Initiate & Activate Forward Momentum for Positive Impact
We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.
— Frederick Douglass
For the past couple of nights when I’d lain down beside her, after she’d called asleep and I knew she couldn’t hear me, I’d promised her that she’d never have to forgive me again if she could do it one last time.
— Nicole Jacquelyn, Unbreak My Heart
The nostalgia of a moment’s love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present.
— Mike Norton
And then his lips were on mine and we were in it, pulling away from the past and rushing fast into the future.
— Renee Carlino, Before We Were Strangers
And so, it is always the case that the past is irreparably land-locked, and the future has yet to land. And here we are, living out our lives on the precariously thin line which separates the two.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Archaeological discoveries made in Egypt and in the Near East in the past hundred years have opened our eyes to a spiritual and cultural heritage undreamed of by earlier generations.
— Samuel Noah Kramer
I have a lack of fear, whereas in the past the fear of failure was a powerful motivator. Anyway, I have great expectations for the future, but I just don’t know if I’m the monarch of all I survey.
— Sylvester Stallone
Unraveling life lessons from just the past few years would take many more years. Lessons unlearned would pass with me, when I went through that door, to be completed in some future lifetime.
— Laurie Nadel, Dancing with the Wind: A True Story of Zen in the Art of Windsurfing
No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.
— Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother
Not everything buried is actually dead. For many, the past is alive.
— Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead
History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
— Hilary Mantel
Ah tell me not that memory Sheds gladness o’er the past What is recalled by faded flowers Save that they did not last?
— Letitia Landon
Recognizing what we have done in the past is a recognition of ourselves. By conducting a dialogue with our past we are searching how to go forward.
— Kiyoko Takeda
My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that they’ve loved in the past and see what else those authors have written.
— Michael Dirda
I was able to bring the souls from the past back to life.-Amaranth
— Carolina Cody Aldaz, The Guardians of the Earth Type Planets
The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.
— Stephen E. Ambrose
I don’t think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
— Robert Morgan
We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?
— Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the elsewhere, the past or the future.
— Eric Berne, Games People Play
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
— George Santayana
We must forget the past because in Jesus Christ, all things have become new
— Sunday Adelaja
In my own case, I employed this experiment mainly in order to seek for the barrier, if any, which divides our knowledge of the past from our knowledge of the future. And the odd thing was that there did not seem to be any such barrier at all.
— J.W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time
We shouldn’t hide behind anger or anonymity when reliving the past because all that’s happened and all those who belong in our past are part of our story.
— Melizena
1 tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
— Carl Sandburg
I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars
— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Who values the past lives sentimentally.Who optimizes the present grabs opportunity.Who balances time creates harmony. Who disturbs harmony leads complexity.Who solves complexity opens continuity.
— Angelica Hopes
Radical common sense is the wisdom gleaned from the past that recognizes the perishable opportunities of the moment. It is the willingness to admit error and the refusal to be deterred by failure.
— Marilyn Ferguson
The fact that you made worse decisions in the past shouldn’t be an excuse to make bad decisions in the present.
— Sanhita Baruah
It made him feel like less of a man. And given how much less of a man he’d felt the past several weeks, that was really saying something. He was surprised someone from the Man Club hadn’t come by to revoke his dick and balls.
— Heidi Betts, Knock Me for a Loop
The struggles of the past are the gateway to the blessings of the future.
— Matshona Dhliwayo
For every moment that is past, the angel of death keeps taking the part that is dead and we keeping living in the present. The parasite wants us to carry the past with us and that makes it so heavy to be alive.
— Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
Sometimes in the past when I played something might make me lose focus, or I would go home after a game where I thought I could have played better and I would let it hang over my head for a long time when it shouldn’t.
— LeBron James
The way you remember the past depends upon your hope for the future. And if what you see in your future has no hope, it has no potential, then you view the past that brought you to here as not very good.
— Story Musgrave
Let go of the pain. But never forget the past lessons.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The false starts and futilities of the past years proved themselves to be groundwork, foundations, laid in the dark but well laid.
— Ursuala K. Le Guin
Don’t let the poison of the past spoil a fruitful future.
— A.D. Posey
After all, history is a type of fantasy. For all the primary source research, in the end, the past world the historian builds is as weird and remote from our own as Middle Earth or Narnia, yet oddly familiar.
— Ysabeau S. Wilce, Flora Fyrdraaca
You need to understand something. Forgiveness isn’t an emotion. It’s an action, and it’s a choice. It’s the choice to not let the past affect how you feel about her.
— Elizabeth Finn, Unforgiven
She hadn’t met Earth or Fire, the other two cousins, but she’d filled a couple of library requests for each of them in the past week. If they were around, they would help her. Wouldn’t they?
— Anne Bishop
I don’t live in the past at all I’m always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.
— Brian Eno
Education in the past has been too much inspiration and too little information.
— E. Franklin Frazier
Ah, but is any history really all that ancient?’ Second asked. ‘Doesn’t every moment from the past affect the present?’ This man was more annoying than any history teacher Jordan had ever had.
— Margaret Peterson Haddix, Redeemed
If it wasn’t possible to reinvent the past in such a way as to make it conform to the present’s cheerful view of the way things ought to have been, why bother living?
— Kathryn Davis
Sometimes you want to change the past by going from the future in the past. But sometimes you find that everything which you have done, it’s not better but it becomes worst but why?(11.22.63 – Better Check it out!)
— Deyth Banger
I don’t fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future.
— Patti Smith
You have the here and now. You have a future. Deal with the past so you can stop looking back. It’s just the pain.
— Jessica Park, Left Drowning
Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Letting go is to love yourself enough to look at the past with a different perspective. It is to accept that you can’t change the past, but that you can change whether your perspective poisons or nourishes you.
— Steve Maraboli
If I let the past and my goals be the only thing that drives me in life, I will never know the meaning of being happy.
— Unarine Ramaru
That mountain of courage I had been building inside me for the past several months began crumbling, tumbling down, and gaining speed like an avalanche.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.
— Kate Atkinson, Life After Life
Let the warning of the tyrants of the past be recognized for it shall be the same one ringing out when the tyrants of the present are unleashed.
— Sai Marie Johnson
Don’t let the blights of the past hold you back from the bliss of the future
— Constance Friday
Regrets of the past can be turned into seeds to grow a more positive future or unlearned, doomed to repeat the same.
— Tambré Bryant
We go to the past to lay the blame – since the past can’t argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.
— Glen Duncan, Love Remains
I suspected, however, that I wasn’t homesick for anything I would find at home when I returned. The longing was for what I wouldn’t find: the past and all the people and places there were lost to me.
— Alice Steinbach, Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman
I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.
— Thomas Love Peacock, Gryll Grange
Don’t judge the past by the standards of today. It won’t work. They’re incompatible.
— Richelle Mead
None of my mental activities for the past twenty-four hours might be called thinking. I had allowed my body to take charge. It knew far more about escaping and healing than I did.
— Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male
There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument.
— Sara Sheridan, Truth Or Dare
To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.
— Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace
The future is only the past again, entered through another gate.
— Arthur Wing Pinero
I realize that life is risks. It’s acknowledging the past but looking forward. It’s taking a chance that we willmake mistakes but believing that we all deserve to be forgiven.
— Carrie Ryan, The Dead-Tossed Waves
The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground for it is the past and it is the future.
— Alfred North Whitehead
Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly.
— Norman Davies, Europe
You want a child because it is a link in the bridge that you are building between the past and the future, a cantilever that holds you, so that you are not alone.
— Dan Chaon, Stay Awake
There has never been an age that did not applaud the past and lament the present.
— Lillian Eichler Watson
If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.
— Blaise Pascal
Fear is caused by the uncertainty of the future. Sorrow is caused by the remembrance of the past. Try to keep your thoughts in the present, for the future we will never know and the past we may never understand.
— Jeffrey Fry
When we feel haunted, it is the pull of our own home we’re experiencing, but a more upsetting possibility is that the past has become homeless, and we are offering it a place to inhabit in the present.
— Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
If today shows no results, that doesn’t mean the past wasn’t working or the present isn’t working. It just means we see only part of the picture. Faith believes God is working in every part of the process.
— Deb Brammer, I Survived!: 5 Bible Characters Who Survived Disasters
Don’t fear the future or regret the past but celebrate the present.
— Tim Mann artist
We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
— John Buchan
As the story grew, it put down roots into the past and threw out unexpected branches .
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
…is any history really all that ancient?…Doesn’t every moment from the past affect the present?
— Margaret Peterson Haddix, Redeemed
Then one day a thought clicked my mind… and even theweirdest event in the past start Making complete sense…
— shivangi lavaniya
Living in the past is like choosing to cling to a chronic illness.
— Asa Don Brown
Many scorned women delude themselves that the past was negative and to be forgotten, whereas the present is positive and to be celebrated. But what they also forget is, at one time they celebrated that past, as the positive present.
— Robert Black
With no sense of smell, your memories dropped like pennies out of a ripped pocket, until the past was ashes and your parents were blanks: nothing more than the holes in Swiss cheese.
— Ilsa Bick
There is no better Eraser for the past than a good use of the present.
— Seun Ayilara
What you do now will be in the past right after you do it.
— Innocent Mwatsikesimbe, Mirror
because in the past words have only driven them apart.
— Jodi Picoult, Picture Perfect
New York is notoriously inhospitable to the past disowning it whenever it can.
— John D. Rosenberg
Let the past drift away with the water.
— Japanese saying
Oh yes, the past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it or learn from it.
— Rafiki
Discover how to visit the past and bring yesterday’s stories into our lives today
— Gillian Hovell, ‘Visiting the Past’
They say you can’t change the past despite the fact it never stops changing you – but that doesn’t mean we have to sit back and take it. It may change us, but we have ultimate control over how we let it.
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
Of this I am certain, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
— Winston S. Churchill
There have been only 268 of the past 3, 421 years free of war.
— Will Durant
If you want to win, drop the past trends. Genius creates new trends and the crowd follows the past.
— Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion
Future is an empty paper, but not absolutely empty; the shadows of the drawings of the past is there, on the paper!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past
— Hilary Mantel
It is not until you change your identity to match your life blueprint that you will understand why everything in the past never worked.
— Shannon L. Alder
Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.
— Louise J. Kaplan
What millions believe is often just fairy tales for children! The fabrications of the past are ridiculously accepted as the holies of people! Glory lies in searching the truth not in believing the irrational legends!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Disregard for the past will never do us any good. Without it we cannot know truly who we are.
— Syd Moore
The future belongs to those who learn from the past and live brilliantly in the present moment.
— Debasish Mridha
Holding on to the past will hold you down in life. Learn from it but move on.
— Jonathan Anthony Burkett
Trying to rewrite the past was a child’s game, a pointless, ridiculous child’s game no one ever won.
— Sabrina Jeffries, A Dangerous Love
Let the past go, Bren, or it will ruin your future.
— Elizabeth Morgan, Cranberry Blood
I suspect each of us uses the past to prop up the bruised present. It’s a clumsy try for the comfort of normality.
— Adib Khan, Spiral Road
Respect the past in the full measure of its deserts but do not make the mistake of confusing it with the present nor seek in it the ideals of the future.
— Jose Ingenieros
For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
— John F. Kennedy
Fate is nothing but the past in the future. It is only an excuse for inaction.
— Omid Banyasad, The Deserter of Alamut
I believe the future is only the past again entered through another gate.
— Arthur Wing Pinero
I may not have had a great background, but I am grateful because nothing could have prepared me for the future than the past I’ve been through.
— Gift Gugu Mona
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
— John F. Kennedy
We study the past history, with the conscience of the present environmental changes; we can only predict the future ecological changes, by emergence of the past into the present.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
I will not allow my mistakes of the past compromise my hope for the future.
— Charles F. Glassman, Brain Drain The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life
Posterity will say as usual: “In the past things were better the present is worse than the past.”
— Anton Chekhov
Don’t let the past steal your present. This is the message of Christmas: We are never alone.
— Taylor Caldwell
Walk through the past and learn the way. I am walking through the present, taking action every day. I am preparing for the future in a great way.
— Debasish Mridha
Let the past be the past as you make your way into the future.
— Avina Celeste
Solitude led to retrospective thinking, and if the past is what you are trying to get away from, then constant distractions in the present are needed.
— R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree
The first principle of contract negotiations is don’t remind them of what you did in the past – tell them what you’re going to do in the future.
— Stan Musial
…the wounds of the past and the scars of the present don’t disfigure me in your eyes – because you know the price I pay for loving you …
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Heal the past and you’ll heal the present.” Kharis Macey
— Kharis Macey, UPON HIS DEATH BED 1: From the Serial – THE FRONT HOUSE JUMBIES
The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time’s great tower, everything was still happening.
— Stephen King, Lisey’s Story
My experiment has demonstrated that people from the past can be artificially reincarnated. The purpose is so people from Twinmortal do not commit the same error that we did.-Amaranth
— Carolina Cody Aldaz, The Guardians of the Earth Type Planets
Maybe this is as near as we can come to forgiveness. Not the past wiped away, nothing undone, but some willingness in the present, some recognition and embrace and slowing down.
— David Vann, Aquarium
(M)uch as we might imagine we can leave the past behind, it has a nasty way of pressing its hoary old face against the window just as we were sitting down to the feast.
— Valerie Martin, The Confessions of Edward Day
I wept more in Korea than in all the past several years put together. These experiences changed my life. I could never be quite the same again . . . I felt sadder, older. I felt as though I had gone in a boy and come out a man.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
There’s no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can’t re-create what’s over.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.
— Alexis de Tocqueville
In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
The policy of the future cannot forever be determined by the politics of the past – or even the present.
— Pete Gallego
Trying to tear down the past prohibits you from building up your future.
— Lil Wayne
The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible, but against their ideas of perfection…
— Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day (235).
— Jack Kerouac
Reiko had not kept a diary and was now denied the pleasure of assiduously rereading her record of the happiness of the past few months and consigning each page to the fire as she did so.- Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
— Yukio Mishima, Patriotism
Loved. You can’t use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all.
— Ken Kesey
We can only predict the future ecological changes, by emergence of the past into the present.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
People tend to look on the beliefs of the past as being primitive and unintelligent, yet we are seeing more truth in the past every day.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Obsidian
Respect the past in the full measure of its desserts but do not make the mistake of confusing it with the present nor seek in it the ideals of the future.
— Josi Incenieros
Living in the past kills your future.
— Habeeb Akande
The single right decision to take is to forget the past so that it does not mislead you at a later stage
— Sunday Adelaja
Lucifer wasn’t sure what to say. He’d survived six thousand years in Hell, but the past sixty without her were the most torturous of his existence.
— J.M. Darhower, Reignite
Art invites us to become explorers and excavators of our vast internal landscapes, discovering new terrain and digging deep into the past to unearth forgotten experiences and emotion.
— Jaeda DeWalt
Nostalgia reaches into the past with both hands to grasp what is already gone and likely never will be again. Legacy reaches into the past with one hand to grasp what is teachable and passes it forward with the other hand to the next generation.
— Al Ainsworth, Lines in the Gravel
In the past year I’ve learned that love can make you do crazy, silly, stupid, ridiculous things. And the fact that one person can make you feel this way and do those things is amazing to me.
— Allie Everhart, Promising You
When the past has taught us that we have more within us than we have ever used our prayer is a cry to the divine to come to us and fill us with its power.
— Rudolph Steiner
The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present.
— Barbara De Angelis
Don’t let the blights from the past hold you back from the bliss of the future
— Constance Friday
Sometimes I think I live more closely to the past than the present.
— Patricia Briggs, Dragon Bones
In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.
— Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
The mind that constantly wanders through the past is always a terrible mess.
— Marwane Caber, THE PAST
During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, TV, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each part of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts.
— David Bohm
The beauty of the past lies in-between the perpetual unhappiness of the future and of those who live it.
— Daniele Mauro
Some astrophysicists have convinced themselves that the fifth significant figure of the fine structure constant has changed over the past ten billion years.
— Sheldon L. Glashow
The future when it comes, is just like the present. The present is all you have and the opportunity of the present is worth more than the success of the past or the promise of the future.
— William J. Reilly, Ph.D.
Comics know that time plus pain equals humor and that we can redeem even awful moments from the past by translating them into a shared experience.
— Gina Barreca
Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.
— Dale Turner
It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.
— David Benioff, City of Thieves
You’re going to struggle. You’re going to do well. You can’t really let the past or the day before – whether you had a good day or bad day – dictate the day you have that certain day.
— Andrew Benintendi
And I’d say one of the great lessons I’ve learned over the past couple of decades, from a management perspective, is that really when you come down to it, it really is all about people and all about leadership.
— Steve Case
I can feel guilty about the past apprehensive about the future but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
— Abraham Maslow
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
— George Santayana
Don’t live in the past – you’ve already been there. And don’t live in the future, either. Tomorrow will be here soon enough. Live in this moment now – it is sacred and unrepeatable. This moment alone holds valuable gifts that should not be missed.
— Steve Goodier
And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind
— Jacques Roubaud, The Loop
We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.
— James Anthony Froude
It takes courage to let go of the past and all the mechanisms you have put in place, in order to ease your pain, regret and fear through avoiding responsibility for it.
— Shannon L. Alder
The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.
— Jean Piaget
I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that’s different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that’s slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.
— Stephen King, Bag of Bones
The future is there, ” Cayce hears herself say, “looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.
— William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object. I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition.
— John Portman
Why ever long for something from the past when the future brings things that are so much better?
— Avery Williams, The Alchemy of Forever
Drugs may know how to numb a brain, but the past never forgets to resurface.
— Kris Kidd
He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he’d landed and made his life, was not his
— Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland
Always dip your toe in the past before stepping into the future
— Benny Bellamacina, Philosophical Uplifting Quotes and Poems
Those who will have studied the past that can define the future will succeed as other who don’t will have misled full of lies.
— Luis Cosajay
Being an American is a state of mind, and to be in a family is to feel the power of belonging, the power of your roots. Family is a tree, the strength of a tree, the roots, the leaves, the past and the present, the future, the fruits, the seeds.
— Esai Morales
There are different ways to be confused about how someone’s disappointed you. Some lie about the future because they wanted to forget the past. But some will lie about the past because they think it will give you both a future.
— Laura Dave, The Divorce Party
No amount of guilt can change the past and no amount of worrying can change the future
— Umar ibn Al-Khattab
Whether you need to remember the past or not, It changes nothing but gives the best choice for the future that makes You always to remember your past.
— Auliq Ice
The king who stepped into the ballroom wearing a green velvet robe and bejeweled crown was none other that the tiger-man who’d prowled through my nightmares and nearly every waking moment for the past two days. Chorda.
— Kat Falls, Inhuman
When the past gets its teeth into our daily life, it may get to grips with an astringent reality and adjust our timeline. By recognizing ourselves in the light of our history, we become aware of what we are. (“Going back to yesterday”)
— Erik Pevernagie
The only thing that makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Doomed
He who does not know his past cannot make the best of his present and future, for it is from the past that we learn.
— Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan
Most creative work is a process of people passing ideas and inspirations from the past into the future and adding their own creativity along the way.
— Joichi Ito
photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself…
— Rebecca McNutt, Smog City
What we have now, shall never be again. The poets of the past sit in amazement of the wanna-be’s of an era long gone.
— T. Grassan, Ramblings of the Clinically Depressed: Images of Darkness Vol. II
I love fashion, and I love changing my style, my hair, my makeup, and everything I’ve done in the past has made me what I am now. Not everyone is going to like what I do, but I look back at everything, and it makes me smile.
— Victoria Beckham
He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.
— Frank Herbert, Dune
Not much has changed in the past 6, 000 years. We still hide from God because we know we’re naked.
— Ron Brackin
In the past few women have tried and even fewer have succeeded.
— Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
He says to me, Ranulph, he says… that the past will never come again, but that we must remember that the past is made of the present, and that the present is always here.
— Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
Two human families have died out on me in the past century alone.” Warrick inclined his head. “It might help if you didn’t eat members of your staff when you’re displeased.
— Erin Kellison, Awakened by Fire
Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
— A. J. P. Taylor
Big events, small, mundane moments of the day–it doesn’t matter; the past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.
— Laura Miller, Butterfly Weeds
I’m sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control.
— Margaret J. Wheatley
Limitlessness is the emotion that sunny mornings evoke in me now. A new appreciation for the present moment, untainted by the past or unknown future.
— Kaleb Kilton
The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong ? To those who can app|y it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialtsts?
— John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.
— Grandma Moses
I feel really humbled and really grateful to have the opportunities that I’ve had over the past couple of years to work with some amazing people. I think, at this point, I just want to put my head down and grind and do honest work.
— Ben Schnetzer
Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different.
— Oprah Winfrey
Only the past is real.
— Frank Lentricchia, The Sadness of Antonioni
It’s not love that the past needs in order to survive, it’s an absence of choices.
— Susan Sontag
I had this daft idea to come and bury the past. Except the past is not quite dead.
— Sherry Thomas, Not Quite a Husband
To enter the past is like poking a baseball bat into a spiderweb: it can’t be done subtly or delicately.
— Robert Silverberg, Needle In A Timestack
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
— Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems
To write? Because all this is ging to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left we nothing, we would be naked on earth.
— James Slater
Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?
— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.
— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
You can’t have one without the other, you can’t be something you don’t believe, you can’t live if you linger in tomorrow, you can’t be in the past and expect to see me, but you can only love when you’re in the right here, right now.
— Jess “Chief” Brynjulson, Highway Writings
I have in the past overly trusted people and was, in turn, let down by some. Since then, I have learned the difference between putting faith into people and blindly trusting them.
— Do Won Chang
Falling down ain’t falling down, If you don’t cry when you hit the floor, It’s called the past cause I’m getting past, And I ain’t nothing like I was before, You ought to see me now
— Alicia Keys
As a mentor you have to learn how to tackle the past of your mentee, be able to put it to sleep and focus to the promising future of him/her.
— Euginia Herlihy
On the nights I stuffed myself full of myths, I dreamed of college, of being pumped full of all the old knowledge until I knew everything there was to know, all the past cultures picked clean like delicious roasted chicken.
— Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories
Fools who don’t respect the past are doomed to repeat it.
— Nico Robin
The bedlamite little hats in which American women have tried to out-lunatic each other for the past four years prove conclusively we don’t dress to please anyone. We’re just docile sheep who accept what’s given us.
— Beatrice Fairfax
In the beginning, ” Scripture taught, “there was the Word, ” and Danny would come to believe that the two great gifts his God had given to the species He loved were time, which divides experience, and language, which binds the past to the future.
— Mary Doria Russell, Children of God
He had understood long ago that the past was no better than the present. That was as plain as day. One had to try to escape, to wrestle free from every era, so as not to be devoured by it.
— Lyudmila Ulitskaya, The Big Green Tent
The present is the necessary product of all the past the necessary cause of all the future.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
In exile, I have tried to profit by the past and prepare for the future.
— Lajos Kossuth
Most of the times, we feel more enjoyment from just recalling good memories of the past rather from those moments we lived, not because we did not have a good time but because realization has come late.
— Dionisis Agelakis
I have run two Olympic ‘A’ standard times over the past 12 months and with the time I ran at the African Championships last week I know my speed and fitness are constantly improving so that I will peak in time for the Olympics.
— Oscar Pistorius
The art of living… is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
— Alan W. Watts
If we choose to hold onto the past and cling to hurt, anger, or whatever, He can’t set us free of it. He won’t take those things by force.
— Dawn M. Turner, Defender
Do we miss not only the past but every future the lost past describes? Is that just the nature of missing? All the lost might-have-beens? The certainty that those uncertain futures are gone?
— Mark Z. Danielewski, Honeysuckle & Pain
He could not afford to indulge misery, to live in the past and stumble through life facing backwards.
— Jonathan Renshaw, Dawn of Wonder
The easiest way to leave the past behind is to remember that love does not live in the past, only memories — love lives in the present.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Many had suspected that the political disasters of the past few years had a hidden cause. The bloodiness of the French mob rule was something unnatural, with a pitiless and inhuman progression that had never been seen before.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
Starting over is an acceptance of a past we can’t change, an unrelenting conviction that the future can be different, and the stubborn wisdom to use the past to make the future what the past was not.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
The one charm about the past is that it is the past.
— Oscar Wilde
And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.
— Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.
— Oliver Stone
They were all gone now, broken or taken by people who had no idea what such items represented. Let them go. She held the past in her heart, with no need of physical items to tie it down.
— Robin Hobb, Ship of Destiny
The past is important for all the information and wisdom it holds. But you can get lost in it. You’ve got to learn to keep the knowledge of the past with you as you pursue the present.
— Lauren Kate, Rapture
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
— Walter Benjamin
By taking control of the present, you are choosing to alter the past you are making for yourself, and your future too.
— Innocent Mwatsikesimbe, Mirror
Victory is not possible, if one doesn’t learn from the past and mistakes made.
— Auliq Ice
Life is too short to be anything but happy. So kiss slowly. Love deeply. Forgive quickly. Take chances and never have regrets. Forget the past but remember what it taught you.
— Abhysheq Shukla, KISS Life “Life is what you make it”
Cynicism leads to despair, while fixating on the efforts that seemed to work in the past makes an idol out of spiritual states.
— Monks of New Skete, In The Spirit of Happiness: A Book of Spiritual Wisdom
Nothing is improbable until it moves into the past tense.
— George Ade
If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.
— John Acton
In that one stolen second, I considered the Glebe girl. She entered my mind like a burglar, them vanished again, taking nothing. It was like the humiliation of the past had been dragged instantly from my back and left somewhere on the ground.
— Markus Zusak, Getting the Girl
Academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should be simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.
— Gordon S. Wood
We cannot let go of the past enough to live in the present unless we are able to grieve our losses. We must deeply feel our emotional pain in order to accept that what is happening is not what we wanted. pg 155
— John Kuypers, What’s Important Now: Shedding The Past So You Can Live In The Present
Be happy today, let the past bury and let the future fly.
— Girdhar Joshi, Some Mistakes Have No Pardon
You need not fear it, but you must always bear in mind that the past is never quite as finished with you as you think you are with it.
— Kathryn Kennish, Switched at Birth: The True Story of a Mother’s Journey
She’d abandoned the animal she loved as she herself had been abandoned repeatedly in the past by people who had claimed to love her.
— Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities
People don’t exist without the past, I know. But the past isn’t alive. It’s you who’s alive.
— SHOOWA, ジンと猫は呼ぶと来ない [Jin to Neko wa Yobu to Konai]
A wise man never dwells in the past because he knows he belongs to the future.
— Debasish Mridha
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.
— Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
The only living life is in the past and future-the present is an interlude- strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness that we are living.
— Eugene O’Neill
Whoever said that the past isn’t dead had it backward. It’s the future that’s already dead, already played out.
— Gayle Forman, Where She Went
Those who only look back at the past are certain to miss their future.
— Elle Sommer
You don’t exist in the past or in the future. You only exist in the present moment.
— Debasish Mridha
All the bad in my life led me to her, which makes me think that I can live with the past if she is my future. —HEW
— Michelle Warren, He + She
…let the past sleep, but let it sleep in the sweet embrace of Christ, and let us go on into the invincible future with Him.
— Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest
If the past is no longer presentis it fiction?
— Natasha Tsakos
To live in joy and fully manifest our true potential, we must let go of our desires and attachment to the past and the future and be excited about living in the unknown.
— Mada Eliza Dalian
Memories of the past are what drive us, whether to a life of beauty or a life of insanity is up to us.
— Abhysheq Shukla, Feelings Undefined: The Charm of the Unsaid
Reading is a time machine that allows you to acquire wisdom from the past and to analyze and imagine another person’s vision of the future.
— Joshua Rogers
Don’t let disappointments & mistakes of the past control and direct your future. Your source of direction and everything is in Christ Jesus
— Mlungisi Simelane
dont dwell on the past when the future smiles bright and the present is by your side
— karinush2828
Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson – that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we’d never be able to choose our own destiny.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Midnight Palace
I took a heavenly ride through our silenceI knew the moment had arrivedFor killing the past and coming back to life”.
— Pink Floyd
That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
There is no future in the past and there is no real hope in the future, only regrets, worries, plans and aim for the best.
— Auliq Ice
For some, excavating the past isn’t an adventure, it’s more akin to tearing a Band-Aid off an open wound.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
It is always perilous to suppose that the past is over and done with or that it can ever safely be disconnected from the pressing concerns of the present.
— Christopher Kelly
Anxiety is stemmed from worrying about the past and worrying about the future!
— John Di Lemme, 177 Motivational Success Quotes to Live the Championship Life
She had thought about that moment so often during the past few years it had dried out. It was stale, like old, odourless potpourri. But she still want back to it, because it was the only one.
— Cassandra Rose Clarke, The Mad Scientist’s Daughter
Forgiveness empties the past of its power to empty the present of its peace.
— L.R. Knost
The Future is as avoidable as the past is alterable, for the latter is, after all, a consequence of the former: A combination of choice and fate.
— K.C. King, Anomaly
You are done with the past, but the past isn’t done with you.
— Deyth Banger
Nothing takes you away from dwelling in the past or worrying about the future like living in the present.
— Roy T. Bennett
Looking back at the past is like deleting what you have created in the present.
— Kyumm
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
— Erich Fromm, The Sane Society
It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you’re alone. It feels less like a wound and more like a poultice.
— Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller
You release the pain of the past and press on. It’s a new day, and God is doing a new thing. He wants to take you to a new place, to transform you into a new person.
— Craig Groeschel, Weird: Because Normal Isn’t Working
It was as if she would never be whole until the secrets of the past were exposed.
— Rachel Abbott, The Back Road
To greet the present is to part with the past and future.
— Grace Sara, Awakening in the 21st Century: Surviving a Spiritually Dormant Society
It is not incumbent on the world to conform to your vision of change. It is up to you to explain the future in terms that those living in the past and present can follow.
— Jay Samit, Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation
If anything has made men more effeminate in the past half-century, it’s been the running feminist critique of masculinity.
— Jack Donovan, Androphilia
Somehow the past is a safe place to explore our collective cultural neuroses.
— Tom Hiddleston
The apparent serenity of the past is an oil spread by time.
— Lloyd Frankenberg
Working together during the past three years, we have confounded the skeptics and the cynics. We’ve shown that here in Virginia, Democrats and Republicans can come together, put politics aside, and make tough decisions when times demand it.
— Mark Warner
…the answer is not in the damn blank page – it’s in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up – exhume the past again …
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
The left puts a lot of faith in a lot of people in the past that were dismal failures that they think are the greatest people who ever lived.
— Rush Limbaugh
The difference in the past and history is that the past is set in stone history is just an account from the guy with the strongest axe
— Andy Andrews, How Do You Kill 11 Million People? Why The Truth Matters More Than You Think
If you have one foot in the past and one foot in the future, you’re pissing on the present.
— Malachy McCourt
A person who can not deal with the past of others, can not deal with yours.
— Davi Oliveira
The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future.
— E. T. Bell
Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.
— Alice Munro
Just because you believe something was true in the past does not mean it will be true in the future.
— Jeffrey Fry
I remember the fire, it burns bright, always around me. I close my eyes, and tears stream out. The tides of the past seize me, bear me out to sea.
— Ned Hayes, Sinful Folk
Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
You can’t write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I’m very interested in what religion does to us – its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.
— Geraldine Brooks
Those unable to catalog the past are doomed to repeat it.
— Lemony Snicket, The End
Losers live in the past. Winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present toward the future.
— Denis Waitley
In his arms I’ve finally found the place I’ve been looking for, where fear can’t touch me, where memories can’t reach, where the past is forgotten and the present is enough. Where the present is, in fact, all that matters.
— Sarah Alderson, Conspiracy Girl
People from the past belong to the past not to the place which you’re heading
— Michelle S.
I thought of all the hardships and people that I had lost in the past few days alone, but, most of all, I thought of how I didn’t regret any of it.
— Shannon A. Thompson, November Snow
The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so once it becomes the past succeed only in making it seem implausible.
— William Manchester, The Last Lion 2: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-40
Dwelling on the sins of the past won’t help us stop the evils of the present.
— Andrew Mayne, Name of the Devil:
We should always be aware that what now lies in the past once lay in the future.
— Frederic W. Maitland
Examination of our past is never time-wasting. Reverberations from the past provide learning rubrics for living today.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
They were of the past, and the past always mend itself, no matter how me interfere.
— Ransom Riggs, Hollow City
You can never be happy if you’re trapped in the past and fearful of the future. Living in the present is the only way to be happy.
— Robert Tew
Procrastination is a way of living in the past instead of the present moment.
— Debasish Mridha
My thoughts by night are often filled With visions false as fair: For in the past alone I build My castles in the air.
— Thomas Love Peacock
I stopped remembering the past and started visualising my future, the only thing left I could hold onto was hope; that the courage I have found along the way, is what will see me through.
— Nikki Rowe
You know that old phrase ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
For he lives twice who can at once employ, The present well, and e’en the past enjoy.
— Alexander Pope
You want to brawl. You want to fight. Fighting tricks you into believing you can change the past, even when the past is dead and gone and all of it ashes.
— Ilsa J. Bick, Ashes
I’m interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.
— Toni Morrison
I’ve never looked forward before. I’ve always looked back. I think about the past way too much and I think about what I should have done and everything I did wrong and I’ve never once looked forward in my life.
— Colleen Hoover, Losing Hope
Why should I forget the past experience? I can only let go of the pain.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
— Philip Roth
The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired.
— Joseph Epstein
There is never another one of you in exactly the same spot you are in right now, so give yourself a break and release blame from the past so you can be free to move around the future!!
— Monika Zands
Stories are for joining the past to the future.
— Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
If the future was bared before you, would it still be yours? If the past could chase you, would you run from it? If the world crumbled tonight, would you carve your own?
— Nicholas Rinth, The Drowned Tower
The greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die.
— Saul Williams, , said the shotgun to the head.
The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past was troubling. I longed for a future too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think , and to speak.
— Frederick Douglass
Whatever with the past has gone the best is always yet to come.
— Lucy Larcom
The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Our parents’ generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best.
— P.D. James, The Lighthouse
To get over the past, you first have to accept that the past is over. No matter how many times you revisit it, analyze it, regret it, or sweat it…it’s over. It can hurt you no more.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can’t, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.
— Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it.
— Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.
— Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans
What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.
— Victor Hugo
Most of us assume that human beings have free will. However, . . . [we] are very much conditioned by our species, culture, family, and by the past in general. . . . It is rare for a human being to have free will. . . . (140)
— Ravi Ravindra, The Wisdom of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras: A New Translation and Guide by Ravi Ravindra
The past ignorance has great lessons for us in our present day. Until we take real lessons from the past ignorance which led us into our present situation, we shall always see shadows of the past in the present.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, Religion, Philosophy and life
Intruding upon a dimension rightfully ours, modern medicine robs us of the dignity of what people in the past regarded as most precious: that final moment of death.
— Shinmon Aoki
Dec. 31… “Let the past rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ. Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.
— Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest
The middle years caught between children and parents free of neither: the past stretches back too densely it is too thickly populated the future has not yet thinned out.
— Margaret Drabble
The past is always with us. It echoes through every living moment, giving it depth and meaning beyond itself. Sometimes the past is so powerful, those echoes threaten to overwhelm the present.
— Trish Feehan
We have formed a sick little friendship over the past year
— Dee Remy, There Once Was A Boy
Sometimes you can’t let go of the past without facing it again.
— Gail Tsukiyama, The Samurai’s Garden
When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
— Martin Amis, Other People
In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.
— Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow
I still wanted to go home, but had to enter the tunnel and pray for the best. Every day, I discovered more disadvantages to being a strong woman, although the past week made me feel like Hercules in a burkha.-Grace Madison, PhD
— N.L.B. Horton, When Camels Fly
How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
— Alfred North Whitehead
The prison bars deny you the now. You are forced to always think about the past or the future.
— E. Leo Foster, The Exiles
The time before was slow, as much as I grow as much the time don’t forgive. As most people will say if you fuck the past, the past fucks you!
— Deyth Banger
Every moment, every breath, is a new opportunity. An opportunity to let go of the past and to become the person you choose to be.
— John Bruna
Self-acknowledgment boosts your emotional and spiritual immunity, giving you the strength you need to release the past and rise above fear, doubt or resignation.
— Debbie Ford
I recall that now and I recall everything for what do we have but the past to parent us?
— Kathleen Driskell, Seed Across Snow
The humans were protecting their heritage, or so they thought. Strange that Mud Men seem more concerned about the past than the present.
— Eoin Colfer
Sculpting the future and healing the past can only happen through mindful action in the present moment.
— Darren Main, The River of Wisdom: Reflections on Yoga, Meditation, and Mindful Living
Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
This was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner.
— Lauren Oliver, Rooms
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past not to worry about the future nor to anticipate troubles but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.
— Buddha
Life is divided into three terms – that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.
— William Wordsworth
Do not allow the negative of the past to mask your sight.
— Asa Don Brown
The mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it all the past as well as all the future.
— Joseph Conrad
Those who have hurt you in the past cannot continue to hurt you now unless you hold on to the pain through resentment.
— Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?
Vaccines and antibiotics have made many infectious diseases a thing of the past we’ve come to expect that public health and modern science can conquer all microbes. But nature is a formidable adversary.
— Tom Frieden
Change is to focus all your energy not in fixing the past but in recreating the future.
— Seal the Smile
What I’ve learned is that the past might be challenging and the future might be unsure. And that’s okay. The present is all we’re given, anyway. When we get to the future, God will be there. He’ll supply whatever we need for each day.
— Becky Wade, True to You
… the past was what we carried with us, threaded to the future, and we decided whether to keep it close or let it go.
— Alice Hoffman, The Museum of Extraordinary Things
The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is simply to release any images and emotions.
— Jack Kornfield
The old days are dead and gone days. For what I did in the past I have been punished. I have been cured.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
We have to know the truth about the past to discover out future.
— Patti Callahan Henry, Between The Tides
Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection the past then lives in your words and you are free.
— Jessamyn West
When he is dissected after his death, ” a disrespectful interpreter said of a foreign dignitary, “a million predicates will be found in his stomach: those he swallowed in the past decades without saying them.
— Kató Lomb
Sometimes you wish the world would be a better place and sometimes you wish the world was a better place. Only the great understanding of the difference of the time between the past and present moment will make it a better place.
— Jammy Creamer
He who knows the past well can best explain the present and can tell the probable certainties and uncertainties of the future better
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
He ought to let the past keep its glow and not try to mix it with what he had in the present.
— Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
Lessons from the past create hope for the future and action in the present.
— Orrin Woodward
In the past the man has been first in the future the system must be first… The first object of any good system must be that of developing first class men.
— Frederick W. Taylor
I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before.
— Isabel Allende, Paula
The mistakes of the past are valuable lessons for the future.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
The soul of the world had opened and I fantasized that everything wicked, distressing and painful was on the point of vanishing…all notion of the future paled and the past dissolved. In the glowing present, I myself glowed.
— Robert Walser, The Walk
An echo from the past when, innocentWe looked upon the present with delightAnd doubted not the future would be kinderAnd never knew the loneliness of night.
— Noël Coward, The Complete Verse of Noël Coward
Call me an optimist, but in the past 300 years we have built amazing technologies which – by and large – have advanced humanity.
— Sebastian Thrun
For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.
— Winston Churchill
Remembering the past always comes with an image or a view attached.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the f
— John F. Kennedy
Where are you? In the past or in the future? It doesn’t matter because if you are not in today you are in the wrong place!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.
— Leonardo da Vinci
Young men speak about the future because they have no past, and old men speak of the past because they have no future.
— Boyd K. Packer
These were not the belongings of the past prisoner he had imagined. These were a lady’s things—hairpins and stockings and a glove. There were more clues waiting but William no longer felt certain he wanted to know the dark secrets of this cell.
— Gwenn Wright, Katherine’s Journal
The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.
— Shannon L. Alder
The past is called the past for a reason. If you are constantly looking behind you, your eyes aren’t on the road ahead. You don’t drive the car that way, so why should you live your life that way?
— Rachel Van Dyken, The Bet
When we think carefully about the past, we get to know and understand not just what happened in the past but what really went into things that happened in the past.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.
— Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
I wouldn’t change a thing about what I’ve done in the past because what may have been bad choices have all led me to this moment.
— Minnie Driver
I miss the fears of the past few weeks, rendered small by my fears now.
— Veronica Roth, Divergent Series Complete Box Set
In the past few months, life had lost its sweetness and he’d lost his way. But no longer. Death was once again the enemy, his indifference and apathy drowned in a Cheshire pond.
— Sharon Kay Penman, When Christ and His Saints Slept
In country music, one of the ways we may have gone wrong in the past is trying to be politically correct all the time.
— Blake Shelton
So forgive and forget the past baggage of life to refresh your life.
— Debasish Mridha
Now when the flowers are in full bloom, It is the ashes from the past that hidden loom.
— Selina A. Mahmood, Apophasis: A Bildungsroman Through Facebook
The hardships that I encountered in the past will help me succeed in the future.
— Philip Emeagwali
The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past — no matter how good it was.
— Jeff Bezos
I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.
— Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
Sex exists in the now without past or future. If, for a single second, your minds drifts back to the past or forwards into the unknown, the moment withers like a dead plant and the passage of pleasure turns to a road of dust.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The “better life” she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one.
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Who controls the past controls the future who controls the present controls the past.
— George Orwell
But the past is long, and the future is short.
— Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles
Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.
— Edna Ferber
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana)I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Barefoot, exhausted and bloody, Harris Borden turned and left the underground prison that had been his home for the past twelve years and walked out into the Nevada desert.
— Glen Robinson, Elijah
The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.
— Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
The mind of man is capable of anything–because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage–who can tell?–buttruth–truth stripped of its cloak of time.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
I do not regard the limits of the past and present as the limits of humanity of the future
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
The future belongs to all who, refusing to look back at the past move ahead with the clock as it ticks.
— Odo Simon Agbo, The Dancing Sun
Yesterday has gone, never to return. It is the past and over; learn from its mistakes and look to the future with optimism.
— Marilyn L Rice
When you see recurring problems, the methods you’ve used successfully in the past have to be reevaluated.
— Mark Miller, Chess, Not Checkers: Elevate Your Leadership Game
I’ve been burdened with blame trapped in the past for too long, I’m moving on
— Rascal Flatts
A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls.
— Susanna Kearsley
When we feel lost in time, with only shadows of the past living in our mind; when the moment, which “was”, no longer “is” and when only silence remains, loads of questions arise. We can cry a river or we may wonder: “What went wrong?
— Erik Pevernagie
I have spent the past ten years in just about every war zone there was.
— Christiane Amanpour
Putting the past behind you isn’t like stuffing something in the back of a drawer or trimming a loose thread. The past has a life of its own.
— Maggie Mitchell, Pretty Is
The terrible thing is that it’s impossible to tear the past out by the roots.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Reach into the past and remember the reasons you fell in love. Hold on to that, son, and cherish it. Then you must start moving forward again.
— J.L. Berg, Ready for You
Because supposedly those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
In one bold stroke, forgiveness obliterates the past and permits us to enter the land of new beginnings.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
There are some things in the past that… that just aren’t meant to be viewed.
— Rebecca McNutt, Mandy and Alecto: The Collected Smog City Book Series
He (Daedalus) would follow that bearing, the sun on his shoulders and the past slipping away.
— Robert William Case, Daedalus Rising – The True Story of Icarus
The difference between the modern laws and those of the past is that wisdom is no longer a respected requirement and it has become secondary in importance to bureaucratic procedure.
— Gwendolyn Taunton, Primordial Traditions Volume One
Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.
— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
All I’d done for the past ten years was talk about it. I was sick of talking…sick of analyzing…sick of reliving it…sick of the screaming in my head that replayed over and over like a song stuck on repeat.
— S.A. Healey, Empty Me Out
Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Study the past if you would define the future.
— Confucius
You have to make the decision to let go of the past if you want to move forward.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
You are walking along a road peacefully. You trip. You fall into blackness. That’s the past – or perhaps the future. And you know that there is no past, no future, there is only this blackness, changing faintly, slowly, but always the same.
— Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
It’s like that, I guess, when the past come to collect what you owe.
— Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues
For the innocent, the past may hold a reward, but for the treacherous it’s only a matter of time before the past delivers what they truly deserve.
— Emily Thorne
I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.
— Bob Dylan
We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable.
— Frans Kellendonk, Het Complete Werk
Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves – regret for the past and fear of the future.
— Fulton Oursler
The most basic method one can use to let go of the past is by looking at it as a learning experience.
— Stephen Richards, The Pain You Feel Today Is The Strength You Feel Tomorrow
Appreciate the lessons of the past and enjoy the newness of the future, yet remember the present is today.
— Annette Thomas
But the past cannot be changed, and we carry our choices with us, forward, into the unknown. We can only move on.
— Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing
A life lived mired in resentment is one that is lived primarily in the past and this is never one that is filled with joy.
— Taite Adams
Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.
— Susan Griffin
Oh hours of childhood, when behind each shape more than the past appearedand what streamed out before us was not the f
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
In love one cannot be mediocre, nor can one sustain love without work. The choices in the past were not enough, and it was necessary to choose again.
— Simone Troisi, Chiara Corbella Petrillo
If the past never helped you why would you ever take it into the future with you?
— Shannon L. Alder
My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and see every shadow.
— Barry Hannah, Airships
In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.
— Andre Gide
Once we get to know where and why the skeletons of the past are buried, we can start wading across our muddled memories into the open plains of a new horizon. (“Going back to yesterday”)
— Erik Pevernagie
The Master said, “A true teacher is one who, keeping the past alive, is also able to understand the present.”(Analects 2.11)
— Confucius
It is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you but ever that of the present alone. Even this burden too can be lessened if you confine it strictly to its own limits.
— Marcus Aurelius
Every time the long-forgotten people of the past are remembered, they are born again!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Kim was more than a little inclined to snarl at him, but in the past few days she had learned that snarling at Mairelon did little good. He simply smiled and corrected her grammar.
— Patricia C. Wrede, A Matter of Magic
Read the stories of the past to write your story for the future.
— Habeeb Akande
Well, I think the first thing to do when trying to let go of the past is to accept it. Denial only delays the problem for later. Deal with it now.
— Innocent Mwatsikesimbe, The Reason
Don’t let life’s challenges discourage you. Some things are just out of your control. Make it work for you! The most painful lessons of the past can teach you how to survive in the present .
— Carlos Wallace, Life Is Not Complicated-You Are: Turning Your Biggest Disappointments Into Your Greatest Blessings
The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.
— Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
If I shut everything else out and filled the room with memories, the past could become the present, and I could live there, with him. I would never leave.
— Na, I’ll Be Seeing You
The beauty of the past belongs to the past.
— Margaret Bourke-White
The flesh endures the storms of the present alone the mind those of the past and future as well as the present.
— Epicurus
Today expect something good to happen to you no matter what occurred yesterday. Realize the past no longer holds you captive. It can only continue to hurt you if you hold on to it. Let the past go. A simply abundant world awaits. (January 11)
— Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy
Am I the only onewishing life away?Never caught up in the momentbusy begging the past to stayMemories painted with much brighter ink;they tell me I loved, teach me how to think.
— Dodie Clark
Believe me, Michael:Those who flee from the past will always lose the race.I know this from experience. When you reach your goal, Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur, You will find your past failures waiting there to greet you.
— T.S. Eliot
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.
— Carl Sandburg
We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten…. Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Bluebeard
In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer – the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with the power.
— A. J. P. Taylor
Patterns of the past echo in the present and resound through the future.
— Dhyani Ywahoo
Tell yourself you’re dead, the way Matt does, so the past can’t hurt you.
— Ilsa J. Bick, Drowning Instinct
I have great expectations for the future, because the past was highly overrated.
— Sylvester Stallone
Have the courage that you will trample over your I’ll struggles of the past till all is settled for your celebrations. You will be victorious in the face of difficulties if only give are courageous!
— Israelmore Ayivor, Dream Big!: See Your Bigger Picture!
Language is not only a means of speech and thought, it is a bridge with the significant function of bringing the wealth of the past to our day and conveying today’s heritage and our new compositions to the future.
— M. Fethullah Gülen, Speech and Power of Expression: On Language, Esthetics, and Belief
The fate of the Right in the late modern age is to destroy what remains of the past in a vain attempt to recover it.
— John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism
Everyone expects to go further than his father went everyone expects to be better than he was born and every generation has one big impulse in its heart-to exceed all the other generations of the past in all the things that make life worth living.
— William Allen White
It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.
— Edith Beale
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
— Mohsin Hamid, Moth Smoke
My discontent has accumulated over the past months, searching for a leak in the dam I’ve constructed to separate my true feelings from the situation closing in around me.
— Doug Cooper, Outside In
Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant…
— Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams
It seems improbable, unless one knows how obstinately, purposefully and unerringly any stricken animal will find its way to the same place where in the past it has endured suffering and recovered.
— Georgi Vladimov, Faithful Ruslan
Sometimes, at the least opportune times, the past is an insomniac, alive and well.
— Courtney Cole, If You Stay
But I can’t see anything any more: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Focusing on the past is only a barricade to the future. Once you overcome that barricade, the possibilities are endless.
— Brandon Cella
Music replays the past memories, awaken our forgotten worlds and make our minds travel.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
This moment has nothing to do with the last one unless you choose the past to continue.
— Alan Cohen
Still, truth is how I remember it now. In a way, I am changing the past from my desk here in the future as I write. It always happens like this. This is how we all tell our story.
— J.D. Radke
Over the past two hundred years philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity’s cardinal error -the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals.
— John Gray, Perros de paja: Reflexiones sobre los humanos y otros animales
Doesn’t the world see the suffering of millions of Palestinians who have been living in exile around the world or in refugee camps for the past 60 years? No state, no home, no identity, no right to work. Doesn’t the world see this injustice?
— Ismail Haniyeh
there’re times when i suspect that the mind has a mind of its own. it shows us pictures. pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. this mind’s mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice
— David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Keeping baggage from the past will leave no room for happiness in the future.
— Wayne L. Misner
The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote.
— Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887
However much we would adore the past it will forever die in the future with us.
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
I began to curse the past for passing.
— Mara Rostov, Eroica
You ever had the feeling the future’s become the past while you were busy being scared?
— Benjamin Johncock, The Last Pilot
Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Night is when the whispers of the past become the echoes of the present.
— Faraaz Kazi
Dwelling on the past only defeated her chances for changing the future.
— Francine Rivers, An Echo in the Darkness
A very wise man once told me that you can’t look back-you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.
— Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls
You can’t suspend me…I quit. I’ve seen a new side to this company in the past few months. I want nothing to do with it. Consider this as me giving in my notice. Now get away from my computer so I can finish my fucking job.” – Vincent
— Stuart Keane, The Customer Is Always…
But this was what happened when you didn’t want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.
— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. On the contrary, though I remain no less sadly certain than in the past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can be achieved and would like to see more of it.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited
Never waste your energy to dwell on the past failures and mistakes.May you find renewed energy, courage and hope to pursue new adventures.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind
Just because the roads were bad in the past we drive slow but if we still continue the same way on the highway of Life, you can never ‘Accelerate
— Harrish Sairaman
How foolish we are to keep repeating the negative memories from the past in our minds, while rarely thinking of the good times, nor being thankful for what we have. Be good to yourself and repeat and focus on the positive.
— Maddy Malhotra, How to Build Self-Esteem and Be Confident: Overcome Fears, Break Habits, Be Successful and Happy
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
But thing in the past are like plate that’s shattered to pieces. You can never put it back together like it was, right?
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be
— Jamaica Kincaid
The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.
— Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.
— Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men
When we quit focusing on the wrong in the past or the uncertainty of the future, we get to monitor and determine our emotional states, as we enjoy and surrender to our present moment with confidence that we shall be led to our next destination.
— Dr. Jacinta Mpalyenkana, Ph.D, MBA
We study the past ecological history, with the conscience of the present ecological conditions, the only window to predict the future environmental and climate changes.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
Depression is a red herring, ” said Nariman. “I think a lot about the past, it’s true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. and there is not much percentage in the future.
— Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters
Don’t worry about the past and don’t try to figure out the future
— Garrison Keillor, A Christmas Blizzard
In simple, the past is a time gone by and no longer exists in the present moment, but we choose to allow this past to occupy our minds, our bodies and our very existence.
— Asa Don Brown
Arms wrapped around me, I looked over the past boxed up and piled haphazardly about, like memories in a person’s brain. It was only a matter of knowing where a thought was and dusting it off.
— Kim Harrison, Holidays Are Hell
Forgive the past to welcome the future.
— Debasish Mridha
To be in the present time, keep yourself busy always or else you will find yourself either in the past or in the future!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Acceleration can never happen if the baggage of the past in pulling you from behind!
— Harrish Sairaman
The mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.
— Joseph Conrad
Think of tomorrow, the past can’t be mended.
— Confucius
The past is a place of reference, not a place of residence; the past is a place of learning, not a place of living.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world.
— Sylvia Mathews Burwell
Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look.
— James Burke, Connections
Look to the past only to find ways to improve your present and future, never to find regrets. Don’t let what has happened in the past limit your life now. Let your past expand your life.
— Avina Celeste
To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.
— Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces
My hunch is that pop culture began to stagnate the moment Americans started to love the past more than they did the future.
— Graydon Carter
A step from the past always demands a step in the mind backed by a robust action. The very place you fall is the very place you make the first move to move.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, Religion, Philosophy and life
As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past *ought* to have been it was.
— Gore Vidal, Burr
He wanted to leave the past a few hundred miles down the road, shake it off like dust. But that ws the problem with the past. It kept finding him.
— Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Keeper: A Novel
Just because the past didn’t turn out like you wanted it to, doesn’t mean the future can’t be better than you ever imagined.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics
If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past’s past), then why should our future resemble our current past?
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
Against the subtle cries of nature, I found peace. I found home. I found the past and the future strung into a present that demanded to be lived.
— Jeni Dhodary, Jesus of Suburbia
It’s been my experience, Langford, that the past always has a way of returning. Those who don’t learn, or can’t remember it, are doomed to repeat it.
— Steve Berry, The Charlemagne Pursuit
In every man’s life there are moments where looking to the past may ruin the future and in those moments walking forward without looking back is the best thing one can ever do!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
the greatest Americanshave not been born yetthey are waiting patientlyfor the past to die
— Saul Williams
Fuck the past and everyone that dragged you here.
— Real Friends
A poet is born in the present, lives in the past and thinks in the future.
— TRIPURARI
What has happened in the past is gone
— Sunday Adelaja
because the past was always around her and might return at any time. It prowled the world searching for her, and she knew it was growing angrier at every passing day.
— Nicholas Sparks, Safe Haven
In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body.
— William James
Everyone is lonely, we have to remember that life is to be lived one day at a time. You cannot worry about the past or future. Happiness is in the now.
— Claudia Gray
The past is a ghost that haunts us. Ghosts must banished. Lingering on the past is weakness, Lord Vader.
— Paul S Kemp
Look to the past with wisdom, and look to the future with courage.
— Stacey T. Hunt
To enjoy the beauty of life, live in the moment, not in the past or future.
— Debasish Mridha
You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.
— Madeleine L’Engle, The Arm of the Starfish
The internet has become a political space. I think that is one of the most important developments in the past decade.
— Julian Assange
Whether beautiful or terrible, the past is always a ruin.
— Matthew Flaming, The Kingdom of Ohio
I do believe the most important thing I can do now is to help young people understand the past and prepare for the future.
— John C. Stennis
It does not matter how much we distance ourselves, how far we run – the past always shadows us.
— Jayne Castel, Night Shadows
When i spend too much time in my head, focused on things in the past or things in the future… when i lose sight of the present, i fold in on myself, mentally, my thoughts become toxic and distorted, my emotions, darken.
— Jaeda DeWalt
In the past people only added to their minds. Now people can become complete and live in heaven if they subtract what is in their minds.
— Woo Myung, Stop Living In This Land, Go To The Everlasting World Of Happiness, Live There Forever
Holding on to the past is like groping in the dark room when you have the opportunity to turn on the light. You only stumble, fall and hurt yourself.
— Wogu Donald
Women forget all the past moments of the most intimate moments and the good sex when they have the next level of best sex with someone else. They just need someone to take out their hidden fantasies.
— Himmilicious
It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.
— Ally Condie, Matched
Cast the burden of the present along with the sin of the past and the fear of the future upon the Lord.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students
The unreality of the past weeks lifted like a fog, but its residue remained. All of the past is like that, but most especially the parts that are out of the ordinary.
— Madeline Claire Franklin, The Poppet and the Lune
Sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.
— Rachel Joyce, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy
If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.
— Andre Gide
One is too precious about the past, the other too hungry for the future. One arm being dragged into the past by the ethics of historic preservation, the other being yanked towards a hopeful (bigger, brighter, better) future.
— Winy Maas, Visionary Cities. Urgencies for the City of the Future
Be satisfied and pleased with what thou art Act cheerfully and well thy allotted part Enjoy the present hour be thankful for the past And neither fear nor wish the approaches of the last.
— Martial
A leader’s goal is to improve on upon the past and if your goal is to remain where you are, doing the same things you have done times and times again, you can’t lead.
— Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders’ Frontpage: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts
To preserve the past is to save the future…
— Nanette L. Avery
The historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence.
— T. S. Eliot
When you live in the present, the past is forgotten & the future takes care of itself.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
Looking forward is the future, standing where you are is the present. looking back is the past. A memory is a piece of the past snipped and played as a short movie or story.
— William Eckard
The world is all change, my friend. We all would like to go back, but the past is done. We must look forwards. We must change ourselves, however painful it may be, or be left behind.
— Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold
I do kabbalistic meditation. It’s not unlike time travel it can change the past and not just the future. You can look at what was lost and go beyond the grief of what was lost.
— Roseanne Barr
Lights, ” I said softly. This had become my favorite word over the past week. In my mind, it had become synonymous with freedom.
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
With the past I have nothing to do nor with the future. I live now.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
learn from the past live in the present plan for the future
— Audrey Farrell
Through loyalty to the past our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow’s joy is possible only if today’s makes way for it that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.
— Andre Gide
He’d learned in the past few months that telling a girl what to wear–even one the size of a golf club–was a bad idea. Histrionics often followed.
— Kristin Hannah, Home Front
The present is an eternal attempt to separate the past from the future.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups
Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no future in the past. Any tour into the past is perhaps courage to live at the average level as you did; old and cold, blind and blunt! Come out! Out of the past and change position. You matter, your future matters
— Israelmore Ayivor, Daily Drive 365
That was the danger of nostalgia, Drizzt realized. One often remembered the good of the past while forgetting the troubles.
— R.A. Salvatore, Passage to Dawn
By forgetting the past and by throwing myself into other interests, I forget to worry.
— Jack Dempsey
That is what the past was, that which you could not get rid of. The past did not resemble the crumbs spilled over a rug. You could not shake them out from open windows.
— Elif Shafak, The Flea Palace
A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.
— J.M. Barrie, The Works Of J. M. Barrie
Truth: We are the present. We are now. We are the razor’s edge of history. The future flies at us and from that dark blur we shape the past. And the past is forever.
— N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent
The past wasn’t a guest you could ask to leave when you tired of its company. No, the past put up its feet and meant to stay.
— Sonja Yoerg
I could faintly smell the ocean. I imagined being one of the old oak trees standing there swaying in the wind and braving all sorts of weather. I pondered what they had seen in the past and what they might see in the future
— Nancy B. Brewer
If she had learned anything in the past weeks it was that there was enough to be ashamed of in the course of a messy human life without being ashamed of loving someone.
— Shannon McKenna, Behind Closed Doors
It surprised me that I was already using the past tense. People I knew. As if I didn’t know them anymore.
— Ashley Newell, Freakhouse
I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions that they exist only in the present which is what there is and all that there is.
— Alan Watts
I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?” She studied him, her eyes grave. “Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.
— Stephen King, Doctor Sleep
Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and runing its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do-the only thing-is run.
— Lauren Oliver, Delirium
Mindfulness helps you understand that the past is gone, can’t be changed and all the lessons are already learned.
— Lidiya K., This Moment
Living in the past is a dull and lonely business looking back strains the neck muscles causes you to bump into people not going your way.
— Edna Ferber
If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him.
— Abraham Lincoln
That sign of old age extolling the past at the expense of the present.
— Sydney Smith
You cannot control the past but you have control over the life you build going forward.
— Nancy D. Butler, Above All Else, Success in Life and Business
Leave the past behind. Give privacy your future . Body and mind in yours now. Perceive the world around you, feel the world inside.
— 1 Minuto na Palma da Mão
History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.
— Johan Huizinga
In reality, time doesn’t pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren’t separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations. And since the past isn’t a location, you can’t travel to it.
— Michael Crichton, Timeline
Death is a mirror that gives us a glimpse of who we really are.Death is a rearview mirror that puts the past into perspective.
— Mark Batterson, All In: You Are One Decision Away From a Totally Different Life
Shovels aren’t very glamorous, but they’ve been liberating entire communities from malaria for the past 5, 000 years.
— T.K. Naliaka
Don’t allow the faults you’ve made in the past define the person you are today.
— Mya Waechtler
The walls of books around him dense with the past formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
— Ross MacDonald
When you forgive, you in no way change the past – but you sure do change the future.
— Bernard Meltzer
Sometimes, it is best that the past stays buried.
— Preeti Shenoy, It Happens for a Reason
Next month, I will celebrate my 30th anniversary of marriage with my beautiful bride, Vicki. Our marriage has been a blessing. I have gained even more respect for the institution over the past 3 decades and will defend it against attack.
— Todd Tiahrt
We decide how much we want our past to be a part of our present.I stopped inviting the past into my life.It took the hint and stopped showing up.
— Scott Stabile
The man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity.
— G. Stanley Hall
You can never forget the past unless you face up to it.
— Fan Wu, February Flowers
A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
— Honore de Balzac
I’ve never seen such a hunger in people for spiritual things . . .People realize the past is gone, the future is uncertain, and the present seems to be hopeless. As a result, many [in Moscow] were open to God.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
sometimes the past is the best memories you lived ever cause it’ll never repeat again
— Christine Minasian
I’ll never stop dreaming that one day we can be a real family, together, all of us laughing and talking, loving and understanding, not looking at the past but only to the future.
— LaToya Jackson
It is not the pain from the present that is killing you, but all your repressed feelings from the past that adds weight to it.
— Linda Alfiori, The Art of Loving Again: How to More Intelligently Start Again After a Breakup, Divorce and the Death of a Loved One
When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain
— Mohsin Hamid, Moth Smoke
He still loved her—and every moment that he didn’t have her hurt him deeply. That was why he’d spent the past nine days with a shadow of her soul, why he’d sought to reset the entire universe to have her back.
— Lauren Kate, Rapture
You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
To rid oneself of the past is to forgo the future…
— Nanette L. Avery
Despite the increase in world attention toward Sudan in the past months, the genocide in Darfur has continued without any serious attempt by the Sudanese government to do what governments primarily exist to do, protect their citizens.
— Tom Allen
Don’t let your past cloud your judgement for the things that are happening in the present. Past is nothing but a distant memory. Fear of something that has happened in the past will ruin your present happiness.
— Ashbeel Roy
Sometimes we are very convinced that what we went through needs to be re-lived so we end up going back and forth to the demons of the past and eventually we fail to get over them.
— Stephen Richards, The Pain You Feel Today Is The Strength You Feel Tomorrow
Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.
— Sophocles
I’m overly excited to finally announce this amazing global partnership deal back home with EMI Music. I know I have mentioned doing music in the past but for legal reasons I was not in a position to release any new music.
— Melanie Brown
When the past is hard to explain, it’s best to concentrate on the future.
— Nell Zink, Mislaid
I’m not singing for the future I’m not dreaming of the past I’m not talking of the fist time I never think about the last
— Shane MacGowan
Photographs shape the past in our own image.
— Chloe Thurlow, A Girl’s Adventure
Many people feel like they were born into the wrong family. Nevertheless, adults must take responsiblity for the pain of the past and create a productive life in the present.
— James P. Krehbiel
What is the past but what we choose to remember?
— Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter
Rehashing the past wouldn’t change anything. Time to move forward.
— Zena Wynn, Beyond the Breaking Point
Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don’t regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses.
— Rebecca McNutt, Shadowed Skies: The Third Smog City Novel
There is an opportunity for us to renew ourselves. There’s an opportunity for us to leave the past behind and present something different for the future.
— Jay Weatherill
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Today is the future of yesterday.Today is the foundation of tomorrow.Today is going to be the past of future.
— Bina
Sometimes you have to fight for the past and sometimes you have to let go.
— Shannon Mullen, See What Flowers
In every man the memory of the struggles and the heroes of the past is alive. But these memories are not incompatible with the desire for peace in the future.
— Gustav Stresemann
People talk about history and things like slavery, genocide, and religious persecution as horrors that happened in the past because we were ignorant. But nothing’s changed. We still hate what we don’t understand.
— J. Matthew Nespoli
Worry is worthless. It can’t change the past or control the future. It only spoils the moment.
— Darrin Patrick
What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now.
— William Glasser
If reality is as equally valuable as fiction, then you should just chalk up the parts of the past you don’t need to your imagination
— Ryohgo Narita
The glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present.
— Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
It is okay of talking about the past, as long as there’s no bitterness and anger. It only gives you a heart attack. It won’t change the past either.
— Ann Marie Aguilar
Just because you stumbled a few times in the past doesn’t mean you won’t overcome. Realize that adversity and challenges arise, but you are made stronger. Embrace the day. Seize the moment. Your time is now.
— Amaka Imani Nkosazana, Heart Crush
The future is only the past again entered through another gate.
— Arthur Wing Pinero
The present contains nothing more than the past and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
— Henri Bergson
Never let the emotions of the past tie you down for your future to slaughter. Resist every opportunity to become angry and you will live a healthier happier life!
— Israelmore Ayivor, Daily Drive 365
Sluka shook her head. “We’re talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It’s like their only reason for existing was so they could die.
— Alastair Reynolds
Sometimes we have to soak ourselves in the tears and fears of the past to water our future gardens.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.
— John F. Kennedy
Pain of the past never goes away, you just find a way to deal with it. And in the future……. all the promise it holds…. that’s what keeps you moving forward, and out of the darkness.
— Samantha Towle, Trouble
Every moment is brand new, but we often fill the new with fear of the future or pain of the past instead of simply enjoying the present.
— Vivian Amis, The Essentials of Life
We had a choice between Democrats who couldn’t learn from the past and Republicans who couldn’t stop living in it…
— P.J. O’Rourke
If it’s over, then don’t let the past screw up the rest of your life.
— Nicholas Sparks, A Bend in the Road
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
— Virginia Woolf
Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.
— Dee Hock
For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.
— Davis Bunn, Lion of Babylon
The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.
— Zora Neale Hurston
We may be finished with the past but the past is not finished with us.
— Donald Riggio, Seven-Inch Vinyl: A Rock and Roll Novel
The dead are the past and we cannot escape the past. Without the past there will be no future.
— M.R. Gott, Where The Dead Fear to Tread
Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory
— James Stephens, Irish Fairy Tales
This seems to be happening more and more, the dreams from the past blurring into reality and sadly, I preferred to be in the dream world rather than reality.
— Emily Williams, Letters to Eloise
If forensic analysts confiscated your calendar and e-mail records and Web browsing history for the past six months, what would they conclude are your core priorities?
— Chip Heath
Power is better than revenge. Power is a live thing, by which you reach out to grasp the future. Revenge is a dead thing, reaching out from the past to grasp you.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Borders of Infinity
A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today – and in fact we have forgotten.
— John F. Kennedy
When you’re in the safety of the future, the past doesn’t seem so relevant.
— S.A. Tawks, Mule
The present is too often squandered grieving the past or fearing the future, which makes the present nothing more than a cheap facsimile of what was or what will be instead of what it could be.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
With each passing moment I’m becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.
— Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
This moment is our greatest treasure. We cannot replay the past events. We have no control over future events.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
— George Orwell, 1984
Most of us don’t have the past in our favor but we have to realize that we still have the present.
— VaeEshia Ratcliff-Davis
‘One Yellow Daffodil’ is both a look to the past and to the future and expresses my belief in the great spirit and strength of our children.
— David A. Adler
…that it is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
— Brian Friel, Translations
The most visceral science fiction always takes place in the past and focuses on the humdrum
— Dean Cavanagh
Somehow, the pain and rage and confusion of the past eighteen years dissolves until all that is left is this one perfect moment; unscripted, unedited, it’s ours and ours alone.
— Heather Demetrios, Something Real
We cannot change or put right the past, it is our choice whether to be happy in this very moment. The present is all we have and problems only live in the past or the future.
— Kate Skylark, Daddy’s Wicked Parties: The Most Shocking True Story of Child Abuse Ever Told
I don’t care what you have done in the past or will do in the future, I will still love you forever.
— Debasish Mridha
If we open a quarrel between the past and the present we shall find we have lost the future.
— Winston Churchill
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
— E. M. Forster
Do not cry over the past mistakes. Laugh over the events in time. Make things right now.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Those who face that which is actually before them unburdened by the past undistracted by the future these are they who live who make the best use of their lives these are those who have found the secret of contentment.
— Alban Goodier
But I can’t confront the doubts I have.I can’t admit that maybe the past was bad, and so, for the sake of momentumI’m condemning the future to deathso it can match the past.
— Aimee Mann
Getting stuck in the past and whining about who had hurt us hampers our personal growth and submerges us in the sea of self-compassion.
— Balroop Singh
Some people want the past repeated and have an interest in making sure we don’t remember it.
— Paul Krugman
Frequently we do not leave the past behind. We clasp on to it. We dissect it, and let fears for the future, tempered by the past, unconsciously prevent us from taking up the task eternal.
— Ray Simpson, Exploring Celtic Spirituality
Stop digging up the past, lay down your shovel, the past is dead.
— Bert McCoy
I saw this was the way of the future, to leave the past behind as if it were a dream.
— Alice Hoffman, The Museum of Extraordinary Things
I’ve never felt as happy as I’ve been for the past month. And I’ve never loved anyone like I love you right now.
— Natalie Ansard, The Sorceress from Beverly Hills
In a time like that, the past meets you wherever you turn. The days do not use their own hours and minutes, they find ones you have lived through with the person you are missing.
— Ivan Doig, English Creek
The faith religious believers have in God is small compared to the faith people put in politicians, knowing how many times they have been disappointed in the past but still insisting that this time it will be different.
— Jonathan Sacks
We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.
— Margaret MacMillan
The question was, could he forgive the past in order to have a future with her? Any future?
— Nicola Sinclair, Promise
The real problem of the world is that the number of the current idiots is much greater than the intellectuals of the past decade all together.
— Kambiz Shabankare
An exciting and inspiring future awaits you beyond the noise in your mind, beyond the guilt, doubt, fear, shame, insecurity and heaviness of the past you carry around.
— Debbie Ford
We cannot move forward if we allow the past to pull us back.
— Rodrigo Duterte
The pages that follow will be our journey of the life we built together here in Concord, North Carolina. These pages will reveal fragments from the past and events that occurred along the way.
— Nancy B. Brewer, Lizzie After the War
One fine day she left the past behind and gave privacy to the future. He took his now to take a walk, watch the sun, listen to good music, spread smiles and be grateful!
— 1 Minuto na Palma da Mão
Take time to gather up the past so that you will be able to draw from your experience and invest them in the future.
— Jim Rohn
There is seldom any rational reason for having regreats about past deeds or events. Because the past does not exist in any other way than in your memory.When you recognise this lack of reality, you can be calm.
— Paul Wilson, The Little Book of Calm
Our standards of morality are begotten of the past needs of society, but is society to remain always the same?
— Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea
Clear out all of those doubts and fears. Let the past be the past. It’s time.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
The ego romanticizes the past to avoid the true romance of the present.
— Alan Cohen
Memories are the key not to the past but to the future.
— Corrie ten Boom
How do we meditate? It is not thinking about the past or future. It starts with being present.
— Ilchi Lee, Change: Realizing Your Greatest Potential
A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.
— Sidney J. Harris
In every life there are events that reshape one’s sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed.
— Annie Proulx, Barkskins
We always cherish and miss the time passed yet struglling for a better future but after moving to next level we feel the past was beautiful
— Salman Ahmad
In the past a leader was a boss. Today’s leaders must be partners with their people… they no longer can lead solely based on positional power.
— Ken Blanchard
Even so, I think historians have more to offer than perspective on our present woes. The foreign country we call the past also lets us look beyond the horizons of what is, to see what could be.
— Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: Why Making the World a Better Place Isn’t a Fantasy and How We Can Do It
Everyman’s life lies within the present for the past is spent and done with and the future is uncertain.
— Marcus Aurelius
In Iroquois society, leaders are encouraged to remember seven generations in the past and consider seven generations in the future when making decisions that affect the people.
— Wilma Mankiller
Robert had taught him to keep his thoughts in the present or near future, for as Robert had told him, To dwell in the past is to live in regret.
— Raymond E. Feist, Talon of the Silver Hawk
The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
— Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams
Let’s forget the past and keep in mind the future, but enjoy the present moment.
— Debasish Mridha
Don’t be bound by the past and its failures. But don’t forget its lessons either.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
You made it clear you did not want to discuss the past with him. I followed through on your request.”“By beating him senseless?”Calisto looked at Tom, then back to her. “Perhaps he never had any sense to begin with.
— Lisa Kessler, Night Walker
A great source of calamity lies in regret and anticipation; therefore a person is wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or future.
— Oliver Goldsmith
We can go and explore different roads in our future, but the past ones are permanent, just like our greatest memories.
— Alexander Georgiev
There is no getting away from the past or from one’s destiny.
— Laxmi Hariharan, The Destiny of Shaitan
Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?
— Diane Setterfield, Bellman & Black
Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
— Thomas Sowell
The leaders who we admire who have been able to bring great change in the past – Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela – they’re all inspirational religious leaders and smart tacticians. It would be nice to find the Muslim Gandhi, wouldn’t it?
— Dennis C. Blair
One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.
— Gaston Bachelard
When we put things off until some future-probably mythical-Laterland, we drag the past into the future. The burden of yesterday’s incompletions is a heavy load to carry. Don’t carry it.
— Peter McWilliams
Having spent the better part of my life trying either to relive the past or experience the future before it arrives I have come to believe that in between these two extremes is peace.
— Anonymous
Today is felt to be the most complicated day in our lives and rarely in trying to deal with the issues of today, are we aware of the impact of the past on those issues.
— Martha Char Love, What’s Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct
Living in the past is a conscious or an unconscious choice made through a connection to the past.
— Asa Don Brown
The music that I’ve made in the past has had strong contemporary country roots, but I think moving on in music, I will branch out from that a bit.
— Jennette McCurdy
Is any life so isolated that it lives only in the past and not in the present and future, too?
— Jackson Burnett, The Past Never Ends
September 11 was a wake-up call to me. I don’t want to contribute to the hate in any shape or form. I now regret in the past being silent about what I have heard in the Islamic discourse and being part of that with my own anger.
— Hamza Yusuf
Our archives are treasure troves – a testament to many lives lived and the complexity of the way we move forward. They contain clues to the real concerns of day-to-day life that bring the past alive.
— Sara Sheridan
If we are meant to be gifts to one another, living in the past negates the present we need to be.
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with “The Divine Presence”
When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
It is hard to write it in words that I can read, that re-establishes the fact that has been haunting me for the past one year.
— Kudrat Dutta Chaudhary, Laiza- Sometimes the end is only a Beginning
Failing to forgive yourself for certain wrongs you committed in the past can create self-dislike.
— Stephen Richards, The Pain You Feel Today Is The Strength You Feel Tomorrow
It is time to recognize the past and ongoing genocides to prevent new ones. Together we can build a better world!
— Widad Akreyi
Progress far from consisting in change depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are content to repeat it.
— George Santayana
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