Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Past.
There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place
George Santayana, letter to Mary
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
I cannot sing the old songs, Or dream those dreams again,
Charlotte Barnard
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
Adrienne Rich
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
The past always looks better than it was because it isn't here.
Finley Peter Dunne
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 past is at least secure.
Daniel Webster
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
Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.
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.
James Barrie
May you look back on the past with as much pleasure as you look forward to the future.
Paul Dickson
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.
Buddha
The people who live in the past must yield to the people who live in the future. Otherwise the world would begin to turn the other way round.
Arnold Bennett
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
Henri Bergson
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
John Berger
In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.
Maxim Gorky
The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
Mary Catherine Bateson
The future is an unknown, but a somewhat predictable unknown. To look to the future we must first look back upon the past. That is where the seeds of the future were planted. I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
Albert Einstein, Interview, 1930
Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look.
James Burke
