Past Quotes

We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.

Lyndon B. Johnson, December 13, 1963

Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent.

Krishnamurti

Danger past, God forgotten.

Scottish Prove

An election is a bet on the future, not a popularity test of the past.

James Barrett Scotty Reston

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Forbes Book of Business Quotations

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past. I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast.

Bob Dylan, "If you see her, say hello".

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

Antoine Rivarol

The past is but the past of a beginning.

H. G. Wells

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

It might be said that Lord Rosebery outlived his future by ten years and his past by more than twenty.

Sir Winston Churchill

Over the past ten years, for the first time, intelligence had become socially correct for girls.

Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire of the Vanities".

While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.

Ronald Reagan

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

Lillian Hellman

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Soren Kierkegaard

He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.

George Orwell

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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

L. P. Hartley

Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.

Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Thse who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found - - In himself.

Erich Frohm

Rash indeed is he who reckons on the morrow, or haply on days beyond it for tomorrow is not, until today is past.

Sophocles

This only is denied to God the power to undo the past.

Agathon

The rest of the world is sweeping past us. The oil and gas of the Texas future is the well - Educated mind. But we are still worried about whether Midland can beat Odessa at football.

Mark White

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

Thomas Carlyle

The future is the past returning through another gate.

Arnold Glasgow

Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present - which seldom happens to us.

Jean De La Bruyere

I think we agree, the past is over.

George W. Bush, On his meeting with John McCain, Dallas Morning News, May 10, 2000

Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

Charles Dickens

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.

John Sladek

Learn from the past, Hope for the future, Live in the present.

Ken Lancaste

Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils but present evils triumph over it.

La Rochefoucauld

Geschichte ist... ein Dialog zwischen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit. re - Transl.: History is... a dialogue between the present and the past.

Edward Hallet Carr, Was ist Geschichte?, S. 54

For there is no greater pain, than to remember in present grief, past happinesses.

Dante, The Divine Comedy

Things that are done, it is needless to speak about... things that are past, it is needless to blame.

Confucius, The Confucian Analects