Past Quotes

The future is the past returning through another gate.

Arnold Glasgow

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

Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.

Sir William Osle

Every man is his own ancestor, and every man is his own heir. He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past.

Frederick Henry Hedge

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

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

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

Lewis Mumford

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

William Ralph Inge

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Albert Einstein

We can pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

John Buchan

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

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

Laurence J. Pete

You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.

Jan Glidewell

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

Arabian Prove

The past is but the beginning of a beginning.

H. G. Wells