Past Quotes

If you're still hanging onto a dead dream of yesterday, laying flowers on its grave by the hour, you cannot be planting the seeds for a new dream to grow today.

Joyce Chapman

'Tis not to see the worldAs from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,And heart profoundly stirred;And weep, and feel the fullness of the past,The years that are not more.

Matthew Arnold, Growing Old

The past, present, and future, were all equally in gloom.

Jane Austen

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

Oscar Wilde

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

Joan Didion

The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.

Dwight D Eisenhower

You must never regret what might have been. The past that did not happen is as hidden from us as the future we cannot see.

Richard Martin Stern

The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

Walt Whitman

Even though you may want to move forward in your life, you may have one foot on the brakes. In order to be free, we must learn how to let go. Release the hurt. Release the fear. Refuse to entertain your old pain. The energy it takes to hang onto the past is holding you back from a new life. What is it you would let go of today?

Mary Manin Morrissey

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.

William Penn

For the past twenty years you and I have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex

C.S. Lewis

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

Edward Thomas

Mr. Meant-to has a friend, his name is Didn't-Do. Have you met them? They live together in a house called Never-Win. And I am told that it is haunted by the Ghost of Might-have-Been.

Marva Collins

All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put the past together again. So let's remember: Don't try to saw sawdust.

Dale Carnegie

Losers live in the past. Winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present toward the future.

Denis Waitley

The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.

Thomas Carlyle

Clogged with yesterday's excess, the body drags the mind down with it.

Horace

What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.

William Least Heat Moon

You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

John Green

The next day is never so good as the day before.

Publilius Syrus