Quotes about past

Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity.

— John Adams

Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.

— George Ade

It is one thing to learn about the past; it is another to wallow in it.

— Kenneth Auchincloss

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

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

— Francis Bacon

There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you -- if you don't repeat it.

— Pearl Bailey

Nostalgia is a seductive liar.

— George W. Ball

The past should be a springboard, not a hammock.

— Ivern Ball

I cannot sing the old songs, Or dream those dreams again,

— Charlotte Barnard

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.

— Sir James M. Barrie

As lousy as things are now, tomorrow they will be somebody's good old days.

— Gerald Barzan

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

— Walter Benjamin

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

— John Berger

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

— Henri L. Bergson

Many are always praising the by-gone time, for it is natural that the old should extol the days of their youth; the weak, the time of their strength; the sick, the season of their vigor; and the disappointed, the spring-tide of their hopes.

— Caleb Bingham

Yesterday is a canceled check: Forget it. Tomorrow is a promissory note: Don't count on it. Today is ready cash: Use it!

— Edwin C. Bliss

If you are carrying strong feelings about something that happened in your past, they may hinder your ability to live in the present.

— Les Brown

The investor of today does not profit from yesterday's growth.

— Warren Buffett

Your past is important, but it is not nearly as important to your present as the way you see your future.

— Tony Campolo

The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.

— Thomas Carlyle

All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put the past together again. So let's remember: Don't try to saw sawdust.

— Dale Carnegie

If you're still hanging onto a dead dream of yesterday, laying flowers on its grave by the hour, you cannot be planting the seeds for a new dream to grow today.

— Joyce Chapman

I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Mr. Meant-to has a friend, his name is Didn't-Do. Have you met them? They live together in a house called Never-Win. And I am told that it is haunted by the Ghost of Might-have-Been.

— Marva Collins

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

Study the past if you would divine the future.

— Confucius

May you look back on the past with as much pleasure as you look forward to the future.

— Paul Dickson

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

— Joan Didion

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.

— Frederick Douglass

The past always looks better than it was because it isn't here.

— Finley Peter Dunne

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

— Albert Einstein

The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

— George Eliot

Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it.

— T. S. Eliot

The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips.

— Francois FeNelon

The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward.

— Fredrich

It is not the literal past, the facts of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

— Brian Friel

To design the future effectively, you must first let go of your past.

— Charles J. Givens

There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternally new now that builds and creates itself out of the Best as the past withdraws.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Look to the past for guidance into the future.

— Robert Jacob Goodkin

In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.

— Maxim Gorky

I never look back, I look forward.

— Steffi Graf

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

— John Guare

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

— Leslie P. Hartley

Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own fortune, and he inherits his own past.

— Francis Herbert Hedge

If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotized by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change.

— Robert Hewison

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.

— Russell Hoban

Clogged with yesterday's excess, the body drags the mind down with it.

— Horace

Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but of what men believe happened.

— Gerald W. Johnson

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

The past, though it cannot be relived, can always be repaired.

— John La Farge

To be able to look back upon one's past life with satisfaction is to live twice.

— Marcus Valerius Martial

What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.

— William Least Heat Moon

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

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Because men really respect only that which was founded of old and has developed slowly, he who wants to live on after his death must take care not only of his posterity but even more of his past.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

— George Orwell

They spend their time looking forward to the past.

— John Osborne

If you're going to be able to look back on something and laugh about it, you might as well laugh about it now.

— Marie Osmond

The good of other times let people state; I think it lucky I was born so late.

— Ovid

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.

— William Penn

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

— Ezra Pound

The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.

— Marcel Proust

There is nothing new, but what has become antiquated.

— French Proverb

Nothing is as new as something which as been long forgotten.

— German Proverb

Don't brood on the past, but don't forget it either.

— Thomas H. Raddal

Who so desireth to know what will be hereafter, let him think of what is past, for the world hath ever been in a circular revolution; whatsoever is now, was heretofore; and things past or present, are no other than such as shall be again: Redit orbis in orbem.

— Sir Walter Raleigh

While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.

— Ronald Reagan

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

— Adrienne Rich

The past does not equal the future.

— Anthony Robbins

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

— George Santayana

Living in the past has one thing going for it; it's cheaper!

— Saying

Always look at what you have left. Never look at what you have lost.

— Robert H. Schuller

Look back, and smile at perils past.

— Sir Walter Scott

Things without remedy, should be without regard; what is done, is done.

— William Shakespeare

We have seen better days.

— William Shakespeare

What is past is prologue.

— William Shakespeare

Fearfulness, contrary to all other vices, maketh a man think the better of another, the worse of himself.

— Sir Philip Sidney

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

— Simone Signoret

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects --making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

— Susan Sontag

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.

— George Steiner

You must never regret what might have been. The past that did not happen is as hidden from us as the future we cannot see.

— Richard Martin Stern

The next day is never so good as the day before.

— Publilius Syrus

Posterity will pay everyone their due.

— Publius Cornelius Tacitus

The function of posterity is to look after itself.

— Dylan Thomas

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

— Edward Thomas

A lot of people go through life like they are rowing a boat. They look at where they have been (the PAST) rather than where they are going (the FUTURE).

— Source Unknown

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.

— Source Unknown

If you look back too much, you will soon be headed that way

— Source Unknown

If you must cry over spilled milk then please try to condense it

— Source Unknown

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

— Source Unknown

It's very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled the past, and, having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.

— Source Unknown

The beauty of the past is that it is the past. The beauty of the now is to know it. The beauty of the future is to see where one is going.

— Source Unknown

The rewards in life go to those who are willing to give up the past

— Source Unknown

Losers live in the past. Winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present toward the future.

— Denis Waitley

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

— Mary Webb

The past is at least secure.

— Daniel Webster

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

— Simone Weil

The people who get into trouble in our company are those who carry around the anchor of the past.

— John Welch

The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

— Walt Whitman

One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

— Oscar Wilde