Past Quotes

Our evolution depends on our memory. If we keep forgetting the mistakes of the past, only to keep repeating them, then we will never change. Humanity will never move forward, spiritually or morally, to become superior beings.

~ Suzy Kassem

We cannot change the past. We can only take action in the present and, therefore, change the future.

~ Ken Poirot

Every time we choose our past over our present we kill our future.

~ Temitope Ibrahim

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.

~ Mother Teresa

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

~ Haruki Murakami

It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.

~ George Harrison

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

~ William Faulkner

My past is everything I failed to be.

~ Fernando Pessoa

The past is a ghost, the future a dream and all we ever have is now.

~ Bill Cosby

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

~ Alan W. Watts

But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until — later of sooner — perhaps — no, not perhaps — quite certainly: it will come.

~ Christopher Isherwood

Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered for they are gone forever.

~ Horace Mann

There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.

~ Eugene O'neill

There was only present, and it was infinite. The past and the future were just blinders we wore so that infinity wouldn't drive us mad.

~ Laini Taylor

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Well we've left behind the 200X's, and we move onto the 20XX's. Maybe that will finally make us feel like we're living in the future, rather than a media controlled slave state where an iPhone is worth substantially more than a human life. Happy new year.

~ Yahtzee Croshaw

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.

~ Pierre-Simon Laplace

In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection.

~ Andrei Tarkovsky

There is only now. And look! How rich we are in it.

~ Vanna Bonta

The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

~ Anton Chekhov

Information about time cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs must be unscrewed and whose drawers must be removed before, in an altered state, it can be upended into the entryway of our minds, then the future is a king-size waterbed that hardly stands a chance, especially if it needs to be brought up in an elevator.Those billions who persist in perceiving time as the pursuit of the future are continually buying waterbeds that will never make it beyond the front porch or the lobby. And if man's mission is to reside in the fullness of the present, then he's got no space for the waterbed, anyhow, not even if he could lower it through a skylight.

~ Tom Robbins

Look back on Time, with kindly eyes -He doubtless did his best -How softly sinks that trembling sunIn Human Nature's West -

~ Emily Dickinson

If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being--ever mindful of its personal style.

~ Tom Robbins

We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.

~ Criss Jami

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced – and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.

~ Carol Shields

But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?

~ Alan Lightman

The past embraces the futureThe future embraces the pastThey are both intertwinedLinked in all eternity

~ Karen Hackel

...the passage of time, which transformed the volatile present into that finished, unalterable painting called the past, a canvas man always executed blindly, with erratic brushstrokes that only made sense when one stepped far enough away from it to be able to admire it as a whole. -pg. 19

~ Félix J. Palma

No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.

~ Jamaica Kincaid

The pathway traced with blood and tears,and dust of all our father's dead,Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red,Fade to the mist of nameless years.(“The Testimony of the Suns”)

~ George Sterling

It’s quite certain there are places to which the whole past is as though attached, on which are traced in secret letters for people who are centuries removed from us their thoughts, their will…

~ Vladimir Odoyevsky

The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future.Cut loose the past; it is dead weight.Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.

~ Stephen Baxter

The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.

~ P.d. James

The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

~ Iris Murdoch

At last, the clock settled in the right place.

~ R.j. Lawrence

Time goes, you say? Ah no!Alas, Time stays, we go;Or else, were this not so, What need to chain the hours,For Youth were always ours?Time goes, you say?-ah no!Ours is the eyes' deceitOf men whose flying feetLead through some landscape low; We pass, and think we seeThe earth's fixed surface flee:-Alas, Time stays,-we go!Once in the days of old,Your locks were curling gold,And mine had shamed the crow. Now, in the self-same stage,We've reached the silver age;Time goes, you say?-ah no!Once, when my voice was strong,I filled the woods with songTo praise your 'rose' and 'snow'; My bird, that sang, is dead;Where are your roses fled?Alas, Time stays,-we go!See, in what traversed ways,What backward Fate delaysThe hopes we used to know; Where are our old desires?-Ah, where those vanished fires?Time goes, you say?-ah no!How far, how far, O Sweet,The past behind our feetLies in the even-glow! Now, on the forward way,Let us fold hands, and pray;Alas, Time stays,-we go!

~ Henry Austin Dobson

He no longer loves the person whom he loved ten years ago. I quite believe it. She is no longer the same, nor is he. He was young, and she also; she is quite different. He would perhaps love her yet, if she were what she was then.

~ Blaise Pascal

We should kill our pasts with each passing day. Blot them out, so that they will not hurt. Each present day could thus be endured more easily, it would not be measured against what no longer exists. As things are, spectres mix with our lives so that there is neither pure memory nor pure life. They clash and try to strangle each other, continually

~ Meša Selimović

The key to our scientific future,....is hidden in our past

~ Dan Brown