Past Quotes

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

~ Bob Dylan

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 Dyer

You can never plan the future by the past.

~ Edmund Burke

The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.

~ Herbert Spencer

While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.

~ Ronald Reagan

Trying to tear down the past prohibits you from building up your future.

~ Lil Wayne

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

~ Jim Bishop

Biodiversity starts in the distant past and it points toward the future.

~ Frans Lanting

My entire life has been an attempt to get back to the kind of feelings you have on a field. The sense of brotherhood, the esprit de corps, the focus - there being no past or future, just the ball. As trite as it sounds, I was happiest playing ball.

~ David Duchovny

I think life is far too short to concentrate on your past. I rather look into the future.

~ Lou Reed

Denver is a city that will be far more defined by its future than its past.

~ John Hickenlooper

Everything that ever happened is still happening. Past, present and future keep happening in the eternity which is Here and Now.

~ James Broughton

When you realize the value of all life, you dwell on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.

~ Dian Fossey

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.

~ George Carlin

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

~ Susan Sontag

Winners live in the present tense. People who come up short are consumed with future or past. I want to be living in the now.

~ Alex Rodriguez

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

~ William Morris

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.

~ Blaise Pascal

Your future takes precedence over your past. Focus on your future, rather than on the past.

~ Gary Ryan Blair

When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.

~ Dian Fossey

I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate.

~ Arthur Wing Pinero

The ultimate function of prophecy is not to tell the future, but to make it. Your successful past will block your visions of the future.

~ Joel A. Barker

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

~ Antoine Rivarol

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.

~ Robert Smithson

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

I have great expectations for the future, because the past was highly overrated.

~ Sylvester Stallone

Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past.

~ Norman Borlaug

The man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity.

~ G. Stanley Hall

Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.

~ Sophocles

I am only 33, I've got a lot to do. This is the first half of my career. I'm looking forward to the future and I'm proud about the past.

~ Ice Cube

I stopped thinking about it after trying to figure out what are the lessons learned, and there are so many. After I had basically sorted that out, I figured it's time to really look at the future and not at the past.

~ Kalpana Chawla

You can't let your past hold your future hostage.

~ Ll Cool J

My hunch is that pop culture began to stagnate the moment Americans started to love the past more than they did the future.

~ Graydon Carter

Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

I haven't been faithful to my own advice in the past. I will in the future.

~ Billy Graham

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

~ David Byrne

We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present.

~ Marina Abramović

I'm not much for sitting around and thinking about the past or talking about the past. What does that accomplish? If I can give young people something to think about, like the future, that's a better use of my time.

~ Arnold Palmer

To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present.

~ Bo Bennett

I really don't spend time thinking about the past. I think about the future. I'm not stopping.

~ Harold Prince