Past Quotes

Mae west - women with pasts interest men... they hope...
I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
Walt Whitman
A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.
Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazurus Long
Jane austen, pride and prejudice - think only of the past as its remembrance gives...
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
Soren Kierkegaard
George orwell - he who controls the past commands the future. he...
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 that the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.
Bertrand Russell
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke
The difference between God and the historians consists above all in the fact that God cannot alter the past.
Samuel Butler, 1835 - 1902
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
Buddha
All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. ... It is not a case of coming to terms with the past. That is not possible. It cannot be subsequently modified or undone.
Richard von Weizscke
This only is denied to God the power to undo the past.
Agathon
Gratitude is born in hearts that take time to count up past mercies.
Charles E. Jefferson
The past is the tomorrow that got away.
Leonard L. Levinson
You can never plan the future by the past.
Edmund Burke
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
George Bernard Shaw
But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke
Those who stare at the past have their backs turned to the future.
Unknown
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.
Be positive in addressing the envelope to your future, For enclosed are your efforts from the past. Be certain of the postage and double check what class.
Unknown
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging the future but by the past.
Unknown
These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.
Vernon Coope
One day at a time - This is enough. Do not look back and grieve over the past, for it is gone; and do not be troubled about the future, for it has not yet come. Live in the present, and make it so beautiful that it will be worth remembering.
Ida Scott Taylor.
It might be said that Lord Rosebery outlived his future by ten years and his past by more than twenty.
Sir Winston Churchill
You must learn from your past mistakes, but not lean on your past successes.
Denis Watley
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein
Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.
Kahlil Gibran, Essay on Robert Frost, quoted in N. Y.. Times: Obit - Editorial, April 1982
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
Lewis Mumford
Throwing a fastball to Henry Aaron is like trying to sneak the sun past a rooster.
Curt Simmons
Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well.
A. Bartlett Giamatti, President of Yale University
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.
Buddha
It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.
Jim Bishop
We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.
Lyndon B. Johnson, December 13, 1963
Geschichte ist... ein Dialog zwischen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit. re - Transl.: History is... a dialogue between the present and the past.
Edward Hallet Carr, Was ist Geschichte?, S. 54
Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.
Robert Benchley
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley
We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.
Lillian Hellman
Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.
Antoine Rivarol
Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened.
Gerald W. Johnston
An election is a bet on the future, not a popularity test of the past.
James Barrett Scotty Reston