Past Quotes

When you forgive, you in no way change the past - but you sure do change the future.

~ Bernard Meltzer

Forgiveness is about empowering yourself, rather than empowering your past.

~ T. D. Jakes

Apology is often the first step in correcting a wrong. Having moved for a position of saying 'I don't need forgiveness,' Mr. Trump is now taking a second look at past behaviors, things that he's said and done that he regrets. While he is not asking for forgiveness for being human, he is admitting that he's made mistakes and humbly making apologies.

~ Alveda King

People will constantly bring up my past and throw it in my face, but the Creator of the Universe doesn't. If you ask forgiveness from Him, then it's gone forever. The past is never brought up to shame you or degrade you.

~ Shawn Michaels

'Caught' is a novel of forgiveness, and the past and the present - who should be and who shouldn't be forgiven. None of my books are ever just about thrills, or it won't work.

~ Harlan Coben

No jealousy their dawn of love overcast, nor blasted were their wedded days with strife; each season looked delightful as it past, to the fond husband and the faithful wife.

~ James Beattie

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us.

~ Robert Smithson

Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another, or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

The beauty of the past belongs to the past.

~ Margaret Bourke-White

Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.

~ André Gide

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

In rising financial markets, the world is forever new. The bull or optimist has no eyes for past or present, but only for the future, where streams of revenue play in his imagination.

~ James Buchan

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

~ Philip Roth

People are powerfully moved by imagination, belief, and knowledge. They can consider the past and future. They can make changes in their behavior out of reason in a way that animals can't do.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.

~ Mason Cooley

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.

~ Geraldine Brooks

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

~ E. T. Bell

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

~ Willa Cather

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

~ Theodore Bikel

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

~ John F. Kennedy

The policy of the future cannot forever be determined by the politics of the past - or even the present.

~ Pete Gallego

To me, Green Arrow in the past, what people loved about Oliver Queen pre-New 52 was his relationships with other heroes. Like his friendship with Green Lantern, his animosity with Hawkman, his romance with Black Canary - these are all the things that sort of defined him.

~ Jeff Lemire

In a basic sense, 'A Little Life' is a homage to how my friends and I live our lives. I wanted to push past the definitions of how we typically define friendship. It's a different version of adulthood, but it's no less important and no less legitimate than anyone else's.

~ Hanya Yanagihara

It is a sad commentary that today we face a choice between having schools that are a monument to our past - or schools that will be the lifeblood of our future. But since that is our choice, let us resolve to choose wisely.

~ Ted Kulongoski

It's a sad indication of where Washington has come, where policy differences almost necessarily become questions of integrity. I came to Washington in the late '70s, and people had the ability in the past to have intense policy differences but didn't feel the need to question the other person's character.

~ Eric Holder

The sad part about our past is that religions, ironically enough, are responsible for creating the most destructive idea that has ever been visited upon the human race: the idea that there is such a thing as 'better.'

~ Neale Donald Walsch

I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.

~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.

~ Tim Berners-Lee

I've always tried to go a step past wherever people expected me to end up.

~ Beverly Sills

The hardships that I encountered in the past will help me succeed in the future.

~ Philip Emeagwali

The fact that I'm very close with my past relationships is something I pride myself on. My mom is still close to her first husband. It's nice to be able to enjoy someone in a different form.

~ Kate Bosworth

The Israeli government has proved over the past year its commitment to peace, both in words and deeds. By contrast, the Palestinians are posing preconditions for renewing the diplomatic process in a way they have not done over the course of 16 years.

~ Benjamin Netanyahu

Despite the increase in world attention toward Sudan in the past months, the genocide in Darfur has continued without any serious attempt by the Sudanese government to do what governments primarily exist to do, protect their citizens.

~ Tom Allen

The same undisciplined government spending and social engineering that has undermined our economy over the past 30 years has also been tearing at the social fabric of this land.

~ Stockwell Day

Humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it's unlikely that humans' early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating or the willpower to complete a dissertation.

~ Annalee Newitz

America needs education reform on all levels to expand quality schools, build on past successes, and lower college debt.

~ Kevin Mccarthy

Girls' education is no silver bullet. Iran and Saudi Arabia have both educated girls but refused to empower them, so both remain mired in the past. But when a country educates and unleashes women, those educated women often become force multipliers for good.

~ Nicholas Kristof

Education in the past has been too much inspiration and too little information.

~ E. Franklin Frazier

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

~ Henry Ward Beecher