Past Quotes

Sick I am of idle words, past all reconciling, Words that weary and perplex and pander and conceal, Wake the sounds that cannot lie, for all their sweet beguiling The language one need fathom not, but only hear and feel.

George Du Maurie

The remarkable thing we have is a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... We cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.

Charles R. Swindoll

It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present and a waste to live in the future.

Frank Herbert, Dune

The present is a rope stretched over the past. The secret to walking it is, you never look down.

Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle, 2004

Look back, and smile on perils past.

Sir Walter Scott

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

L. P. Hartley, The Go - Between

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging the future but by the past.

Unknown

Life is a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.

Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr.

I have made good judgements in the Past. I have made good judgements in the Future.

Dan Quayle

The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character.

Isabelle Eberhardt

The difference between God and the historians consists above all in the fact that God cannot alter the past.

Samuel Butler, 1835 - 1902

Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened.

Gerald W. Johnston

Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. In is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and a manly heart.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.

Wayne W Dye

The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity and many deeds of the past, in order to strengthen his character thereby.

I Ching

Life is divided into three terms - That which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.

William Wordsworth

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Buddha

Those who stare at the past have their backs turned to the future.

Unknown

We must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

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

L. P. Hartley

Virtue extends our days he live two lives who relives his past with pleasure.

Marcus Valerius Martialis

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

La Rochefoucauld

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

Krishnamurti

We can pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

John Buchan

So different are the colours of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.

Victor Hugo

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.

Russell Hoban

Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward - Your destiny - Are here and now.

Dag Hammarskjold, newpaper quote of the day

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - - Making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

Susan Sontag

All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. ... It is not a case of coming to terms with the past. That is not possible. It cannot be subsequently modified or undone.

Richard von Weizscke

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10, 000 men to guard the past.

Maurice Masterlinck

Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.

Kathleen Norris, O Magazine, January 2004

It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather that the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.

Bertrand Russell

Danger past, God forgotten.

Scottish Prove

A strange thing is memory, and hope one looks backward, and the other forward one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses

We do not live to extenuate the miseries of the past nor to accept as incurable those of the present.

Fairfield Osborne

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.

Israel Zangwill

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

La Bruyere