Past Quotes

L. p. hartley - the past is a foreign country; they do things...
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
Lewis Mumford
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley, The Go - Between
Henry wadsworth longfellow - trust no future, however pleasant let the dead...
You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.
Jan Glidewell
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, cattle, barns, and farming tools, for these are more easily acquired than gotten rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labour in.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
Laurence J. Pete
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
The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.
John Sladek
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
A garden is evidence of faith. It links us with all the misty figures of the past who also planted and were nourished by the fruits of their planting.
Gladys Tabe
We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future.
Jeseph Joubert
Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.
Antoine Rivarol
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
Thomas Carlyle
The past is the tomorrow that got away.
Leonard L. Levinson
Ida scott taylor. - one day at a time - this is enough. do not look...
You can never plan the future by the past.
Edmund Burke
Never let a stain from the past put a mark on your future.
Jillian Graham, Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul
Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.
John Updike
Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils but present evils triumph over it.
La Rochefoucauld
Remember your past mistakes just long enough to profit by them.
Dan McKinnon
The first recipe for happiness is Avoid too lengthy meditation on the past.
Andr Maurois
People spend too much time finding other people to blame, too much energy finding excuses for not being what they are capable of being, and not enough energy putting themselves on the line, growing out of the past, and getting on with their lives.
J. Michael Straczynski
Rash indeed is he who reckons on the morrow, or haply on days beyond it for tomorrow is not, until today is past.
Sophocles
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
George Eliot
The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.
Robert Green Ingersoll
The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.
Alfred North Whitehead
We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.
Blaise Pascal
It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.
George Steine
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 Ferbe
So different are the colours of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.
Victor Hugo
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
The past is but the past of a beginning.
H. G. Wells
We must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Over the past ten years, for the first time, intelligence had become socially correct for girls.
Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire of the Vanities".
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
If we think we regulate printing, thereby to rectfy manners, we must regulate all regulations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man.
John Milton
It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.
Elizabeth II
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