Past Quotes
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
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
He who controls the past controls the future.George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty - Four".
To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust.John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.Alexis Charles Henri Clrel de Tocqueville
The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.Alfred North Whitehead
Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Rash indeed is he who reckons on the morrow, or haply on days beyond it; for tomorrow is not, until today is past.Sophocles, Trachiniae
Look not mournfully into the past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future, without fear.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past.Agathon, from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.Sidney J. Harris
Four things come not back - - The spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.Arabian Prove
The past is the tomorrow that got away.Leonard L. Levinson
We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.Lyndon B. Johnson, December 13, 1963
The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.Stephen Ambrose, in Fast Company
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
Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.Kathleen Norris, O Magazine, January 2004
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.John Fitzgerald Kennedy
There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided 1. That dear old soul2. That old woman3. That old witch.Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers (1918) "Prairie".
The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.Rene Descartes
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.Arthur C. Clarke
It would be naive to think that the problems plaguing mankind today can be solved with means and methods which were applied or seemed to work in the past...Mikhail Gorbachev, (1988)
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.Lewis Mumford
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
There has never been an age that did not applaud the past and lament the present.Lillian Eichler Watson
As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak she gave me a younger brother named Russel, who taught me what was meant by survival of the fittest.Bill Cosby
To mourn a mischief that is past and gone Is the next way to draw new mischief on.William Shakespeare
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
When the present is full of gloom, the past becomes haven of refuge that provides relief and inspiration.Jawahar Lal Neheru
At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10, 000 men to guard the past.Maurice Masterlinck
The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are for loving in the present.Barbara de Angelis
Never let the sense of past failure defeat your next step.Oswald Chambers
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.Buddha
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.Soren Kierkegaard
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
