Past Quotes

I just don't want to live like I used to. And at some point, I'm going to put a gag order on myself in terms of talking about the past. I've got to slam the door and deal with the present and the future.

~ Charlie Sheen

The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.

~ Lewis Thomas

One faces the future with one's past.

~ Pearl S. Buck

When thinking about the future, it is fashionable to be pessimistic. Yet the evidence unequivocally belies such pessimism. Over the past centuries, humanity's lot has improved dramatically - in the developed world, where it is rather obvious, but also in the developing world, where life expectancy has more than doubled in the past 100 years.

~ Bjorn Lomborg

I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way.

~ Rebecca Solnit

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Happy is the person who knows what to remember of the past, what to enjoy in the present, and what to plan for in the future.

~ Arnold H. Glasow

In exile, I have tried to profit by the past and prepare for the future.

~ Lajos Kossuth

In charting our course to the future, we are mindful of our path from the past.

~ Brad Henry

Most creative work is a process of people passing ideas and inspirations from the past into the future and adding their own creativity along the way.

~ Joichi Ito

You know when you're young you think you will always be. As you become more fragile, you reflect and you realize how much comfort can come from the past. Hymns can carry you into the future.

~ Andy Griffith

The present moment is changing so fast that we often do not notice its existence at all. Every moment of mind is like a series of pictures passing through a projector. Some of the pictures come from sense impressions. Others come from memories of past experiences or from fantasies of the future.

~ Henepola Gunaratana

To a father, when a child dies, the future dies; to a child when a parent dies, the past dies.

~ Red Auerbach

I do believe the most important thing I can do now is to help young people understand the past and prepare for the future.

~ John C. Stennis