Past Quotes

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

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

You can never plan the future by the past.

Edmund Burke

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

Euripides, Phrixus

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.

William Ralph Inge

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

So different are the colours of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.

Victor Hugo

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

George Orwell

Women with pasts interest men... they hope history will repeat itself.

Mae West

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

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

Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.

Dr. Dale E. Turne

A strange thing is memory, and hope one looks backward, and the other forward one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses

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

La Rochefoucauld

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

Robert Green Ingersoll

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10, 000 men to guard the past.

Maurice Masterlinck

Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.

Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

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

Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire of the Vanities".

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

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

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

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

Dan McKinnon

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

Walt Whitman

In short, the building becomes a theatrical demonstration of its functional ideal. In this romanticism, High - Tech architecture is, of course, no different in spirit - If totally different in form - From all the romantic architecture of the past.

Dan Cruickshank

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.

Buddha

A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today - - And in fact we have forgotten.

Euripides

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

Jean De La Bruyere

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

Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle, 2004

In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.

Andr Gide

Forgiveness is letting go of the hope that the past can be changed.

Oprah Winfrey

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

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

The past is but the beginning of a beginning.

H. G. Wells

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

George Eliot

I have had enough experience in all my years, and have read enough of the past, to know that advice to grandchildren is usually wasted.

Harry S Truman

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

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, 1954