Past Quotes

Ive been waiting for this moment, The one where looking back doesn't seem fascinating anymore & looking forward doesn't seem to be the greatest seek, I am so darn content with creating and living right now that there honestly isn't any room left for the ordinary.

~ Nikki Rowe

What we did and who we were are just dregs compared to who we are now and how we act when the sword is coming down.

~ Rachel Aaron

We cannot keep on blaming the past leaders about the present circumstances. We need to be mindful that if we do nothing to improve the present circumstances, our children will also blame us in the future.

~ Gugu Mona

By means of positive imaginations, leaders bring the future to the present so that they can work on it before setting off to enter it.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Leaders scan the future so it can be free of doubts and fear. They do so by not living a double standard life in the present.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Leaders build the future with clays of the past. Every good moment gives them ideas, every bad moment gives them lessons.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down....

~ Kate Morton

Indeed, the future is signalled in the past, but time has to pass to see it. Art is the witness.BLOG post-Perpetual Beginning-November 14 2011

~ Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox

We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?

~ Chris Kraus

I'll write about my past but I won't talk about it. I'll turn it into art if I can, but I won't talk about it.

~ Anne Rice

If the past is no longer presentis it fiction?

~ Natasha Tsakos

When she started with the first empty canvas, she didn’t know what she was going to paint, she just let her paint brushes glide and they religiously followed the trajectory of her angst; the choice of colours and the strokes, they were all a reflection of what was going through her mind. The reds were the embers within her that refused to die. The blues were the rare instances when she was spent by her grief. The blacks were her moments of absolute weakness, the colour of the bottomless pit within her that she had plunged into, falling through and through. The brush strokes moved around blank canvases like snakes with fangs of elixir that filled her scars with a deluge of hope and a gale of faith in herself. The colours spoke to her in whispers, narrating their own tale while she poured out hers to them. They allowed her to channel her life through them. They listened. They cared. They laughed. They cried. They reassured her that there was life waiting ahead, staring at her past, urging her forward with eager arms. And Preeti rushed into them with her brush in hand that rose along with her and fell along with her.

~ Faraaz Kazi

The past does not influence me, I influence it.

~ Willem De Kooning

She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past.

~ Mohsin Hamid

Only those with whom you have bound karmic accounts, in the past life, will be able to live with you together.

~ Dada Bhagwan

After establishing anything as the absolute truth, its’ conclusion is reached. It doesn’t have to be established as the truth again. What is proven as the eternal established truth for past, present and future is known as the Principle [Siddhant].

~ Dada Bhagwan

How ironic it is then, to realize how many of we humans are masochists! That even when we are placed in paradise, the majority of us would, by choice, focus on everything outside the present moment and make ourselves suffer by thinking about Dis-Ease! Too many of us would dwell on a past that no longer exists while everything in the present moment is wonderful. What great paradoxes we as humans are capable of!

~ Alaric Hutchinson

I respect traditional people - they have the eyes which see value in the tarnished. This is a gift in itself. Tradition requires a wealth of discipline in order to be adhered to, hence it is rarely found in youth.

~ Criss Jami

Every new generation believes its own period to be absolutely superior intellectually - greater than all past cultures yet equal among its modern cultures.

~ Criss Jami

Study the past if you would define the future.

~ Confucius

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

~ L.p. Hartley

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

~ Golda Meir

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

~ George Orwell

People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.

~ Hugo Hamilton

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

~ George Santayana

I’ll tell you another secret, this one for your own good. You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. You may think there’s something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of.But I know the truth: I know from the nights of Coldness. I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do—the only thing—is run.

~ Lauren Oliver

A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

~ Napoléon Bonaparte

Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look.

~ James Burke

I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.What kind of letter? my grandmother asked.I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.You want a letter from me? she asked.I told her yes.Oh, God bless you, she said.The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own. Listen to me.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Think of tomorrow, the past can't be mended.

~ Confucius

...the dreamlike, bombastic wish to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made me who I am now... To sit once more on the warm moss and hold the cap - it's the absurd wish to go back behind myself in time and take myself - the only marked by events - along on this journey.

~ Pascal Mercier

There are no lessons to be learned from the past. This is the first thing I learned from it. There is nothing back then that there isn't here now. There is nothing here now - nothing that matters - that wasn't back then. What matters. Are you a good person? Do you have any love in your heart? What would you do in a given circumstance? It all comes down to something like that.

~ Tom Lichtenberg

The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.

~ Laura Lippman

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.

~ Kate Atkinson

There are ghosts of yourself scattered everywhere,Whispers of a moment suspended in time,Where every life that you've brushed up againstNow lives with a piece of you trapped in their mind.

~ Erin Hanson

Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.

~ James Robertson

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

~ John Berger

I've heard it said before that those who don't learn from the past are bound to repeat it, and I just don't know what I think about that. I figure I don't have too much use for it. The past will just weigh on you if you spend too much time remembering it.

~ Wiley Cash

Your past's a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in xbox where it can't hurt anyone.

~ Catherynne M. Valente