Past Quotes

You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

George Bernard Shaw

No facts are to me sacred none are profane I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Danger past, God forgotten.

Scottish Prove

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

Fairfield Osborne

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

Remember your past mistakes just long enough to profit by them.

Dan McKinnon

This ONLY is denied God The power to undo the past.

Ambrose Gwinett Bierce

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

Be positive in addressing the envelope to your future, For enclosed are your efforts from the past. Be certain of the postage and double check what class.

Unknown

These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

Vernon Coope

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

Napoleon Bonaparte

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

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

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

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.

Buddha

He who controls the past controls the future.

George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty - Four".

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

The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

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 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

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.

Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers (1918) "Prairie".

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.

Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.

Harry S Truman

The future is the past returning through another gate.

Arnold Glasgow

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

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

A garden is evidence of faith. It links us with all the misty figures of the past who also planted and were nourished by the fruits of their planting.

Gladys Tabe

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

Euripides, Phrixus

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

Krishnamurti

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

James Barrett Scotty Reston

You can never plan the future by the past.

Edmund Burke

To live in the past or in the future may be less satisfying than to live in the present, but it can never be as disillusioning.

R. D. Laing

When God wants to speak and deal with us, he does not avail himself of an angel but of parents, or the pastor, or of our neighbor.

Martin Luthe

But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

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