Past Quotes

We need to distinguish between nostalgia and the reassuring memory of happy times, which serves to link the present to the past and to provide a sense of continuity. The emotional appeal of happy memories does not depend on disparagement of the present, the hallmark of the nostalgic attitude. Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable. Nostalgic representations of the past evoke a time irretrievably lost and for that reason timeless and unchanging. Strictly speaking, nostalgia does not entail the exercise of memory at all, since the past it idealizes stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfection. Memory too may idealize the past, but not in order to condemn the present. It draws hope and comfort from the past in order to enrich the present and to face what comes with good cheer.

Christopher Lasch

Nostalgia keeps dissolving the ironic narratives in which I have contained my past.

Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Tw

Olvidar un hecho, es modificar el pasado.(De profundis)

Oscar Wilde

I stole their future from them; I can only being to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.

Orson Scott Card

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

Oscar Wilde

Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity.

John Adams

It is not the literal past, the facts of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

Brian Friel

What is past and cannot be prevented should not be grieved for.

American Indian Proverb, Pawnee

Most people have learned to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their resumes, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.

Alan Lightman, Einstein

It's linkage I'm talking about, and harmonies and structures, And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.

Charles Wright

Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.

Walter Lippmann, 1914

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

Jodi Picoult

That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.

William Wordsworth

I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.

George Eliot

In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past

Henri Frederic Amiel

You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

Jane Austen

As lousy as things are now, tomorrow they will be somebody's good old days.

Gerald Barzan

Things without remedy, should be without regard; what is done, is done.

William Shakespeare

The past does not equal the future.

Anthony Robbins

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

Simone Weil