Past Quotes

I don't think much about guys from the past. I'm glad I knew them, but there's a reason they didn't make it into my future.

~ Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

Neither mine nor other people's prospects seem particularly pleasing just at the moment, and I have fantasies of going to Iceland, never to return. As it is, I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.

~ Edward Gorey

Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.

~ William Osler

Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action.

~ James Luceno

If I could somehow know the future, then now should not be like this time.

~ Toba Beta

Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Yesterday is but to-day’s memory and to-morrow is to-day’s dream.

~ Kahlil Gibran

Nothing is but what is now

~ Ron Rash

Our past cannot be changed, and to be preoccupied with it is inefficient in time and effort. Likewise, by fretting over the future, we only exhaust ourselves, making us less able to effectively respond when the future is actually upon us. By worrying about a mishap that may or may not take place, we’re forced to undergo the event twice—once when imagining it and once again if and when we actually experience it.

~ H.e. Davey

I stole their future from them, I can only being to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.

~ Orson Scott Card

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

~ Oscar Wilde

The young should not think of themselves as immature and the elderly need not view themselves as feeble. Our minds control our bodies. Have no age, transcend both past and future, and enter into naka-ima—the “eternal present.

~ H.e. Davey

If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

By keeping the mind in the present, unless you deliberately want to contemplate the past or future, it’s possible to firmly face life without fear. Then, no thoughts of past failures or future problems will exist in the mind, and a truly positive mental state will result—fudoshin, the “immovable mind.

~ H.e. Davey

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

~ Blaise Pascal

The past, present, and future, were all equally in gloom.

~ Jane Austen

The past is bound to be fragmentary, bound to be reconstructed, bound to be reinvented. It serves only to collect the truths of today. If our present is the child of the past, our past is the child of the present. And the future will be the harvester of our bastard offspring.

~ Amin Maalouf

Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think - the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered? The Martian was silent, but then he looked ahead. But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say.

~ Ray Bradbury

Provide for her Future—if you can!—That's my motto!—But a man's just a plain bum who don't provide for his own Past!

~ Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Ideas define us, our past, our present, and most importantly, our future.

~ P.w. Cross

...[Y]ou cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past.

~ Jan Struther

My skin has the crinkled appearance of wax paper that someone has tried to flatten and reuse. My eyes fail me often—in the darkness, when headlights flash, when rain falls. It is unnerving, this new unreliability in my vision. Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.

~ Kristin Hannah

Many past mistakes paves the road to future discoveries.

~ Steven Magee

Ask yourself:Am I living my past, present or future?

~ Avina Celeste

Truth as a time coordinate; truth lives in the past, the future is uncertain.Truth as a scale coordinate; truth lives in the macro world, the micro world is uncertain.Truth lives in the macro past and uncertainty lives in the micro future.

~ R.a.delmonico

When we live in the past, there is no future.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

Don't worry about your future in the past,Otherwise the sense of enjoyment won't last.By Vinay Chawla

~ Poignant Painters

People who are stuck in the past, miss out on the beauty of the Present and the possibility of the future!!!

~ Harrish Sairaman

For A Glorious Future: Leave Your Past Behind!

~ Harsh Agrawal

I go backwards and forwards, recapturing the past, wondering about the future—and, most unreasonably, I find myself longing for the past more than for the future.

~ Dodie Smith

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I may not have had a great background, but I am grateful because nothing could have prepared me for the future than the past I've been through.

~ Gift Gugu Mona

The future was becoming past, everything vanished into the void, and reaching back to grasp for something, one came out clutching - what? A bit of string, scraps of cloth, shadows of the golden time. If one could only reverse it, turn the past into future, and catch it on the wing, on its journey across the always shifting line of the present ...

~ Rohinton Mistry

Future will forgive us but are you ready to forgive your past?

~ J. Limbu

A poet is born in the present, lives in the past and thinks in the future.

~ Tripurari

You should live in such a way that looking back at your past later on in the future, you will thank God for your life and for what He has done for you

~ Sunday Adelaja

The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or sorrow or wonder than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.

~ Richard Flanagan

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain

~ Mohsin Hamid

Forget the Past. Doubt the Future. Love the Present.

~ Broken