Past Quotes

Dante, the divine comedy - for there is no greater pain, than to remember in...
Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.
Antoine Rivarol
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
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
Harry s truman - i have had enough experience in all my years, and...
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell
Never let a stain from the past put a mark on your future.
Jillian Graham, Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul
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
Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.
Kathleen Norris, O Magazine, January 2004
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
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
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
Study the past if you would define the future.
Confucius
Learn from the past, Hope for the future, Live in the present.
Ken Lancaste
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
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