Past Quotes

There has never been an age that did not applaud the past and lament the present.
Lillian Eichler Watson
Vernon coope - these days people seek knowledge, not wisdom....
Real live preacher, weblog, 04 - 29 - 04 - memory is a giggling sprite and will not be...
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.
Melody Beattie
Things that are done, it is needless to speak about... things that are past, it is needless to blame.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.
William Ralph Inge
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.
The past is a guide post, not a hitching post.
L. Thomas Holdcroft
Our task is not to fix the blame for the past, but to fix the course for the future.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Bob dylan,
Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
Lewis Mumford
This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past.
Agathon, from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Whoso neglects learning in his youth, Loses the past and is dead for the future.
Euripides
If we think we regulate printing, thereby to rectfy manners, we must regulate all regulations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man.
John Milton
Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end results of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.
Eric Hoffe
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
Alan Watts
At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10, 000 men to guard the past.
Maurice Masterlinck
Every advantage in the past is judged in the light of the final issue.
Demosthenes, First Olynthiac
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
One problem with gazing too frequently into the past is that we may turn around to find the future has run out on us.
Michael Cibenko
It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.
Elizabeth II
Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Change is the law of life; and those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
John F. Kennedy
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers (1918) "Prairie".
We ought not to look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dear - Brought experience.
George Washington
Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.
Herb Brody
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
Women with pasts interest men... they hope history will repeat itself.
Mae West
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.
Kathleen Norris, O Magazine, January 2004
The past is the tomorrow that got away.
Leonard L. Levinson
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
This ONLY is denied God The power to undo the past.
Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein
The greatest lesson we can learn from the past... is that freedom is at the core of every successful nation in the world.
Frederick Chiluba
Every man is his own ancestor, and every man is his own heir. He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past.
Frederick Henry Hedge
I must not fear. Fear is the mind - Killer. Fear is the little - Death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Frank Herbert, Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, "Dune".
I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate.
Arthur Wing Pinero
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