Quotes about the Past
Most popular the past quotes
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry — all forms of fear — are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.
Hope resides in the future, while perspective and wisdom are almost always found by looking to the past.
The past is all we know of the future.
It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past.
Today is yesterday's pupil.
No matter how difficult the past, you can always begin today.
We ought not to look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience.
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.
Don't brood on what's past, but never forget it either.
You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.
There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
He who believes that the past cannot be changed has not yet written his memoirs.
Never bear more than one kind of trouble at a time. Some people bear three— all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.
We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
What's past is prologue.
Why doesn't the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present?
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
PAST PLUPERFECT The past, -- well, it's just like our Great-Aunt Laura, who cannot or will not perceive that though she is welcome, and though we adore her, yet now it is time to leave.
The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolor.
When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past—and when you are seventy, nearly all of you.
Never look for birds of this year in the nests of the last.
Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it.
You can never plan the future by the past.
The first recipe for happiness is: Avoid too lengthy meditations on the past.
Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.
A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.
Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.
I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.
An unhappy past always carries painful memories, though it looks at one with ghostly eyes that have lost their fire.
One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.
A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer.
Why is there anxiety about a past we cannot change? The top of my mind has no answer for this.
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for the dying.
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.
If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.
It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crop.
The past cannot be cured.
Be not the slave of your own past.
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
Living in the past is a dull and lonely business; and looking back, if persisted in, strains the neck-muscles, causes you to bump into people not going your way.
The person intent on self-renewal will have to deal with the ghosts of the past—the memory of earlier failures, the remnants of childhood dreams and rebellions, and the accumulated grievances and resentments that have long outlived their cause.
It is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.
The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.
In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere.
The past is a sorry country.
No man can put a rope on the past and hope to snub it down. The best thing is to learn to ride the new trails.
The past is perpetual youth to the heart.
The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.
The glimmering world is the past. And everybody inherits a past. And it glimmers either happily or miserably.
You can live in the past, but there is no future in it.
The past is never where you think you left it.
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes. I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down, a sun dropped in the west.
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Like camels, we lived on our past.
The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it.
Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground.
Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.
The past is a kind of screen upon which we project our vision of the future.
One faces the future with one's past.
As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.
The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.
The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound.
The past is fantasy, and the future is science fiction.
Don't let yesterday use up too much of today.
Study the past if you would define the future.
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
The only way you may correct the bad things in your past is to add better things to your future.
The past is a prison cell with an open door. You can walk out any time you want.
