Past Quotes

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

Unknown

My past is my wisdom to use today... my future is my wisdom yet to experience. Be in the present because that is where life resides.

Gene Oliver, Life and the Artistry of Change

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

A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.

Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazurus Long

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

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

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

Kathleen Norris, O Magazine, January 2004

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

Study the past if you would define the future.

Confucius

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

Thomas Jefferson

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

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, Loses the past and is dead for the future.

Euripides

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

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

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

Trust no future, however pleasant Let the dead past bury its dead Act, - Act in the living Present Heart within and God overhead.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

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

La Bruyere

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

Sophocles

As I rejected amnesty, so I reject revenge. I ask all Americans who ever asked for goodness and mercy in their lives, who ever sought forgiveness for their trespasses, to join in rehabilitating all the casualties of the tragic conflict of the past. On Americans who avoided conscription during the Vietnam War, to Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Gerald R. Ford

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

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

We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.

Blaise Pascal

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

Buddha

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

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

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

Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well.

A. Bartlett Giamatti, President of Yale University

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

The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.

Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.

Cicero

Never let the sense of past failure defeat your next step.

Oswald Chambers

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

Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle, 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

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

The past is a guide post, not a hitching post.

L. Thomas Holdcroft