Past Quotes

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

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot

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

John Guare

Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.

George Ade

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

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

Martin Luther King, Jr.

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

My past has not defined me, destroyed me, deterred me, or defeated me; it has only strengthened me.

Steve Maraboli

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

Those who do remember it will find new ways to screw it up.

Charles Wolfe

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

L.P. Hartley, The GoBetween, 195

The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We must concede the ancients their place... but their past is not simply back there, in a separate and foreign country, it is assimilated in ourselves and resurrected in an ever-changing present.

David Lowenthal, The Past is a F

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

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

To yackety-yak about the past is for me time lost. Every morning I wake up saying, 'I'm still alive -- a miracle.' And so I keep on pushing.

JacquesYves Cousteau, Said at ag

The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated into a contemporary antagonism known as the generation gap.

Spiro T. Agnew

Nothingever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the onset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have a malady in the less attractive forms.

Charles Dickens

I just don't see why the past has to matter.

Cassandra Clare

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

Oscar Wilde

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

We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don

Art Buchwald