Past Quotes

Ursala lequin - to break a promise is to deny the reality of the...
My past is my wisdom to use today... my future is my wisdom yet to experience. Be in the present because that is where life resides.
Gene Oliver, Life and the Artistry of Change
Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Walt whitman - i say that democracy can never prove itself...
Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. In is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and a manly heart.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
George washington - we ought not to look back unless it is to derive...
Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
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
Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past. I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast.
Bob Dylan, "If you see her, say hello".
History repeats itself and history never repeats itself are about equally trueWe never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.
George Macaulay Trevelyan
No facts are to me sacred none are profane I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
Maya Angelou
The present is a rope stretched over the past. The secret to walking it is, you never look down.
Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle, 2004
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
George Bernard Shaw
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
Virginia Woolf
The mind of man is capable of anything - - Because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.
Joseph Conrad
We do not live to extenuate the miseries of the past nor to accept as incurable those of the present.
Fairfield Osborne
We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.
Lyndon B. Johnson, December 13, 1963
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 Watts
Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.
Kathleen Norris, O Magazine, January 2004
It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present and a waste to live in the future.
Frank Herbert, Dune
Virtue extends our days: he live two lives who relives his past with pleasure.
Marcus Valerius Martialis, Epigrams
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
Every man is his own ancestor, and every man is his own heir. He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past.
Frederick Henry Hedge
The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character.
Isabelle Eberhardt
The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity and many deeds of the past, in order to strengthen his character thereby.
I Ching
Never let the sense of past failure defeat your next step.
Oswald Chambers
Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.
Cicero
Show us a man who never makes a mistake and we will show you a man who never makes anything. The capacity for occasional blundering is inseparable from the capacity to bring things to pass. The only men who are past the danger of making mistakes are the men who sleep at Greenwood.
H. L. Wayland
It might be said that Lord Rosebery outlived his future by ten years and his past by more than twenty.
Sir Winston Churchill
Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.
Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
Robertson Davies, "A Voice from the Attic", 1960
Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and archive 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 Steine
He who controls the past controls the future.
George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty - Four".
It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.
Bertrand Russell
Forgiveness means letting go of the past.
Gerald Jampolsky
It is past all controversy that what costs dearest is, and ought to be, most valued.
Miguel de Cervantes
When the present is full of gloom, the past becomes haven of refuge that provides relief and inspiration.
Jawahar Lal Neheru
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.
Euripides