Past Quotes

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Soren Kierkegaard

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

Forget the past and live the present hour.

Sarah Knowles Bolton

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

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

Lewis Mumford

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

L. Thomas Holdcroft

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

Euripides

The first recipe for happiness is Avoid too lengthy meditation on the past.

Andr Maurois

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)

Throwing a fastball to Henry Aaron is like trying to sneak the sun past a rooster.

Curt Simmons

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

Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

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

Fairfield Osborne

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

Krishnamurti

People spend too much time finding other people to blame, too much energy finding excuses for not being what they are capable of being, and not enough energy putting themselves on the line, growing out of the past, and getting on with their lives.

J. Michael Straczynski

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

Buddha

Leaders are the ones who keep faith with the past, keep step with the present and keep the promise to posterity.

Harold J. Seymore

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

Samuel Butle

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

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

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

Every advantage in the past is judged in the light of the final issue.

Demosthenes, First Olynthiac

Past and to come seem best things present worst.

Mary Bertone

There has never been an age that did not applaud the past and lament the present.

Lillian Eichler Watson

Most people live ninety percent in the past, seven percent in the present, and that only leaves three percent for the future.

John Steinbeck, The Winter of our Discontent

For the first time in the history of our country the majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.

James Earl Jimmy Carter, Jr.

I know of no way to judge the future but by the past.

Patrick Henry

Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.

Kahlil Gibran, Essay on Robert Frost, quoted in N. Y.. Times: Obit - Editorial, April 1982

We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future.

Jeseph Joubert

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 world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.

Robertson Davies, "A Voice from the Attic", 1960

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

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

Virginia Woolf

Gratitude is born in hearts that take time to count up past mercies.

Charles E. Jefferson

The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are for loving in the present.

Barbara de Angelis

Penicillin was indeed the product of accidental discovery, but the discovery was made, and the knowledge developed, because certain scientists had definite goals in mind. Chance, Pastuer wrote, favors only the prepared mind. The mind must be prepared not only by scientific training and technological know - How, but also by the awareness of social needs.

Saturday Review

The rest of the world is sweeping past us. The oil and gas of the Texas future is the well - Educated mind. But we are still worried about whether Midland can beat Odessa at football.

Mark White

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

Harry S Truman