Past Quotations
- "Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity."
-- John Adams - "Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense."
-- George Ade - "The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present."
-- Barbara De Angelis - "It is one thing to learn about the past; it is another to wallow in it."
-- Kenneth Auchincloss - "One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort."
-- Gaston Bachelard - "Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time."
-- Francis Bacon - "There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you -- if you don't repeat it."
-- Pearl Bailey - "Nostalgia is a seductive liar."
-- George W. Ball - "The past should be a springboard, not a hammock."
-- Ivern Ball - "I cannot sing the old songs, Or dream those dreams again..."
-- Charlotte Barnard - "A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting."
-- Sir James M. Barrie - "As lousy as things are now, tomorrow they will be somebody's good old days."
-- Gerald Barzan - "The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again."
-- Walter Benjamin - "The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying."
-- John Berger - "The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause."
-- Henri L. Bergson - "The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it."
-- Wendell Berry - "Many are always praising the by-gone time, for it is natural that the old should extol the days of their youth; the weak, the time of their strength; the sick, the season of their vigor; and the disappointed, the spring-tide of their hopes."
-- Caleb Bingham - "Yesterday is a canceled check: Forget it. Tomorrow is a promissory note: Don't count on it. Today is ready cash: Use it!"
-- Edwin C. Bliss - "If you are carrying strong feelings about something that happened in your past, they may hinder your ability to live in the present."
-- Les Brown - "The investor of today does not profit from yesterday's growth."
-- Warren Buffett - "If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians."
-- Warren Buffett - "Your past is important, but it is not nearly as important to your present as the way you see your future."
-- Tony Campolo - "All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put the past together again. So let's remember: Don't try to saw sawdust."
-- Dale Carnegie - "If you're still hanging onto a dead dream of yesterday, laying flowers on its grave by the hour, you cannot be planting the seeds for a new dream to grow today."
-- Joyce Chapman - "We cannot let the past cloud our perception of the future. "
-- Karen Chikodroff - "One problem with gazing too frequently into the past is that we may turn around to find the future has run out on us."
-- Michael Cibenko - "I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it."
-- Sidonie Gabrielle Colette - "Mr. Meant-to has a friend, his name is Didn't-Do. Have you met them? They live together in a house called Never-Win. And I am told that it is haunted by the Ghost of Might-have-Been."
-- Marva Collins - "To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another."
-- Charles Caleb Colton - "Study the past if you would divine the future."
-- Confucius - "May you look back on the past with as much pleasure as you look forward to the future."
-- Paul Dickson - "We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget."
-- Joan Didion - "We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future."
-- Frederick Douglass - "Past is past and we must live the present to survive the future. "
-- Martin Ducavne - "Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you going to do now and do it. "
-- William Durant (Founder of General Motors) - "The past always looks better than it was because it isn't here."
-- Finley Peter Dunne - "The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
-- - "The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower - "With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame."
-- George Eliot - "Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it."
-- T. S. Eliot - "The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips."
-- Francois FéNelon - "The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward."
-- Fredrich - "It is not the literal past, the ''facts'' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language."
-- Brian Friel - "To design the future effectively, you must first let go of your past."
-- Charles J. Givens - "You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest, that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present."
-- Jan Glidewell - "There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternally new now that builds and creates itself out of the Best as the past withdraws."
-- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe - "Look to the past for guidance into the future."
-- Robert Jacob Goodkin - "In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere."
-- Maxim Gorky - "I never look back, I look forward."
-- Steffi Graf - "We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?"
-- John Guare - "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
-- Leslie P. Hartley - "Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own fortune, and he inherits his own past."
-- Francis Herbert Hedge - "If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotized by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change."
-- Robert Hewison - "If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time."
-- Russell Hoban - "The past is a guide post, not a hitching post."
-- L. Thomas Holdcroft - "Clogged with yesterday's excess, the body drags the mind down with it."
-- Horace - "The past is history; The future is a mystery; This moment is a gift; That is why this moment is called the present; Enjoy it."
-- Allan Johnson - "Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but of what men believe happened."
-- Gerald W. Johnson - "Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."
-- J.F. Kennedy - "The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows."
-- - "The past, though it cannot be relived, can always be repaired."
-- John La Farge
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