Past Quotes

One must never lose time in vainly regretting the past or in complaining against the changes which cause us discomfort, for change is the essence of life.

Anatole France

The mind of man is capable of anything - - Because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.

Joseph Conrad

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

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

Buddha

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

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

Napoleon Bonaparte

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

He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.

George Orwell

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, cattle, barns, and farming tools, for these are more easily acquired than gotten rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labour in.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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

Jeseph Joubert

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

Euripides, Phrixus

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

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

Edward Thomas, Poems (1917) "Early One Morning".

Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

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

La Bruyere

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

Thomas Jefferson

When the present is full of gloom, the past becomes haven of refuge that provides relief and inspiration.

Jawahar Lal Neheru

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

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

The past is but the past of a beginning.

H. G. Wells

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

Barbara de Angelis

Living in the past is a dull and lonely business looking back strains the neck muscles, causes you to bump into people not going your way.

Edna Ferbe

Four things come not back - - The spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.

Arabian Prove

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Even God cannot change the past.

Agathon

Over the past ten years, for the first time, intelligence had become socially correct for girls.

Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire of the Vanities".

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

Vernon Coope

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

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

Kathleen Norris, O Magazine, January 2004

The difference between God and the historians consists above all in the fact that God cannot alter the past.

Samuel Butler, 1835 - 1902

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

Sophocles

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

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell

Our task is not to fix the blame for the past, but to fix the course for the future.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

The past is certain, the future obscure.

Thales

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

Jim Bishop