Past Quotes

The past is but an untraceable footfallIt appears in intervals and pushes us back in time,In those moments of grief and then suddenly vanishes.It’s often dark and ruthless.It baffles our thoughts and seizes our peace of mind.By making us recollect our failures, our buried expectationsAnd our shattered dreams It only gives way to fleeting tears, leaving us with fruitless guilt.It wrecks our present and ruins our futureAnd thus should be left where it is meant to beIt should be left behind …

~ Chirag Tulsiani

It's not being in the past, but accepting who we were and being who we are.

~ Roisin Turner

Past beings interact with present ones because life and death are a continuum and expiration entails no loss of vital essence.

~ Michael E. Moseley

To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.

~ Amitav Ghosh

How would your life be different if you learned to let go of things that have already let go of you? From relationships long gone, to old grudges, to regrets, to all the 'could’ve' and 'should’ve,' to the dead friendships you still hang on to... Free yourself from the burden of a past you cannot change.

~ Steve Maraboli

The present is the key to the past.

~ Archibald Geikie

Naturally—and why should I not admit this—I have occasionally wondered to myself how things might have turned out in the long run.... I only speculate this now because in the light of subsequent events, it could well be argued that in making my decision...I was perhaps not entirely aware of the full implications of what I was doing. Indeed, it might even be said that this small decision of mine constituted something of a key turning point; that that decision set things on an inevitable course towards what eventually happened. But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.... What would have transpired, one may ask, had one responded slightly differently...? And perhaps—occurring as it did around the same time as these events?

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

you don't need to go that far in the future, you just have to go 2000 years ago

~ Paulo Coelho

When our sympathy leads to friendship and our friendship leads to love, only few will understand that it is the end of our past.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

I felt like I was living two lives. One in the present and one in the past.

~ A.b. Shepherd

Trying to rewrite the past was a child's game, a pointless, ridiculous child's game no one ever won.

~ Sabrina Jeffries

If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.

~ Elizabeth Kostova

Yesterday I smiled, tomorrow never came and today is what I'm living.

~ Jill Telford

Oh, glorious Art! thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeing moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for at thy touch, all that is great becomes forever present; and illustrious men live through long ages in the visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

I've learned it does not do well to dwell on the past. You cannot change it. you can revisit it, you can remember it, but it simply will not change!

~ Kim Yannayon

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form...The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]

~ Jean-Henri Fabre

Not even God can change the past.

~ Nadeem Aslam

Looking backwardsHas never been my endeavorLost passions… bruised emotionsNever distressed me.

~ Balroop Singh

I've learned to appreciate what I've got. I'm not going to waste an ounce of energy on sorting through the past or with worrying about the future. Life's too short for that.

~ Chris Coppernoll

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

~ T.s. Eliot

...the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.

~ Tim Winton

What our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be

~ Stephen King

It's time to forget about the past,
To wash away what happened last,
Hide behind an empty face,
Don't act too much, just say,
'Cause this is just a game.

~ 30 Seconds To Mars

Tell yourself you’re dead, the way Matt does, so the past can’t hurt you.

~ Ilsa J. Bick

You can never go back to a specific moment. That's why it's important to live in the present and not the past. Don't let foolish memories get in the way of the makings of new ones.

~ Emily Coussons

You need not fear it, but you must always bear in mind that the past is never quite as finished with you as you think you are with it.

~ Kathryn Kennish

They urge us to study our history that we might learn from past tragedies and errors. But sometimes I think it's actually a good thing that humanity so easily forgets. The haze that eventually claims old suffering often enables us to move on.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

If history really forever repeats itself: then, it has always been then.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It’s not necessary for you to exacerbate your contrast with struggle in order to get it into a higher place. It is not necessary to suffer in order to give birth to desire. But when you have suffered and you have given birth to desire, so what? You’ve got a desire. Turn your attention to the desire. Think about where you’re going and never mind where you’ve been. Don’t spend any more time justifying any of that stuff.

~ Abraham Hicks

The past is as easy to travel into as turning the pages of a book...

~ S.r. Ford

It could be yesterdaywhen I was less in loveI thinkFor I didn’t see you in the mirrorbehind mewhile getting dressed.The way your hands couldn’t stay awayand our bodies always found their ways back to each otheras if they were meant to be togetherClose.But then it was today and I saw you againin the mirrorbehind me while getting dressedSo I go to sleep tonightalonewithout actually falling asleep because I’m scared of the moment I will wake upand realise it was just a dreamYou’re actually gone.Now all I can do is get through to another tomorrowhoping that I will be less in loveagainLike yesterdayBut not today.I was never really well with things at all.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

It’s not a crime to wish for other worlds. You’ll get taxed for it but they can’t throw you in jail for creating your own private world…yet. Dramatics are fun, an indulgence. ‘You can’t go backward,’ ‘You can’t live in the past,’ they tell you. Why not? ‘You’ve got to put all that behind you and move on to other things,’ they say. Bullshit! These are all expressions of modern disposability. It’s a mediocritizing technique—trying to get rid of what I call ‘past orthodoxies.’ It’s our past that makes us unique, therefore it’s our past that economic interests want to rob from us, so they can sell us a new, improved future. Society now depends on a disposable world—out with the old, in with the new, including relationships. But how we weep and wish we could hold onto those cherished moments forever, to those long-whispered dreams, those tortured nights—how we want to grasp them and stop them from sifting through our fingers. I say, ‘Don’t let it happen. Keep things the way you want them and let the rest of the world be duped.

~ Anton Szandor Lavey

Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.

~ Jodi Picoult

I was seventeen all over again, falling into intrigue with the boy who was an exquisite contradiction.

~ Blakney Francis

If an object - a star, for instance, like our own sun - is eight hundred light years away from the Earth, it would take light leaving that object eight hundred years until it reached our eyes. So when you look at that object, you are seeing it as it appeared eight hundred light years ago, not as it looks today. It might not even exist anymore. Every time you look up at the stars, you are looking into the past.

~ Wendy Mass

I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.

~ David Sedaris

Living in the past, can only hold those who live there, as its prisoners.

~ Ellen J. Barrier

Wilhelm’s smile reminded Harry of his father’s sad, resigned smile, the smile of a man looking backwards because that’s where the things that made him smile were.

~ Jo Nesbø

I took a heavenly ride through our silenceI knew the moment had arrivedFor killing the past and coming back to life.

~ Pink Floyd