Past Quotes

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
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
Carl sandburg, cornhuskers (1918)
Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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
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
Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.
William Ralph Inge
Samuel butle - god cannot alter the past, but historians can....
Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened.
Gerald W. Johnston
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
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
Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end results of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.
Eric Hoffe
Edmund burke - you can never plan the future by the past....
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
It is past all controversy that what costs dearest is, and ought to be, most valued.
Miguel de Cervantes
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
While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.
Ronald Reagan
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley
Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.
Kathleen Norris, O Magazine, January 2004
Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.
Sir William Osle
Study the past if you would define the future.
Confucius
Our task is not to fix the blame for the past, but to fix the course for the future.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.
Robert Green Ingersoll
Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.
Wayne W Dye
Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and archive mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement, against that past.
George Steine
We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future.
Jeseph Joubert
Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present - which seldom happens to us.
Jean De La Bruyere
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993
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
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
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
The future is the past returning through another gate.
Arnold Glasgow
Show us a man who never makes a mistake and we will show you a man who never makes anything. The capacity for occasional blundering is inseparable from the capacity to bring things to pass. The only men who are past the danger of making mistakes are the men who sleep at Greenwood.
H. L. Wayland
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
For there is no greater pain, than to remember in present grief, past happinesses.
Dante, The Divine Comedy
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
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
The present is a rope stretched over the past. The secret to walking it is, you never look down.
Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle, 2004
Forgiveness means letting go of the past.
Gerald Jampolsky
Forgiveness is letting go of the hope that the past can be changed.
Oprah Winfrey