Past Quotes - page 2

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. (George Washington)
The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
Oscar Wilde
The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.
William Faulkner
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
Robertson Davies
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Frank Herbert
The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now.
Sigmund Freud
The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.
Stephen Ambrose
Lie on the bridge and watch the water flowing past. Or run, or wade through the swamp in your red boots. Or roll yourself up and listen to the rain falling on the roof. It's very easy to enjoy yourself.
Tove Jansson
I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
George Eliot
There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.
George Carlin
Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
The past is a bucket of ashes.
Carl Sandburg
If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
Hunter S. Thompson
Ironically, the first thing that appealed to me about Islam was its pluralism. The fact that the Koran praises all the great prophets of the past.
Karen Armstrong
Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils But present evils triumph over it.
François de La Rochefoucauld
The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.
Oscar Wilde
Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.
Woodrow Wilson
If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
Baruch Spinoza
In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.
Knut Hamsun
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title. (Virginia Woolf)
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
Henri Bergson
Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
Learned Hand
History is the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instructor of the present, and monitor to the future.
Miguel de Cervantes
If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace.
Eckhart Tolle