Past quotes
10.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside past — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"When you see people on the street, they're living in their phones. They aren't living where they are - they haven't got the energy of the past. And so it's something that needs to be reestablished."
"The past can't be changed, can it? It can just be forgiven."
"I feel quite sure that the American people, if they have knowledge and leadership, can meet any crisis just as well as they met it over and over again in the past."
"I think that in great crises you need to have deep rooted convictions and I have a feeling from the kind of campaigns that I have watched Mr. Nixon in in the past that his convictions are not very strong."
"In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)"
"We broke up, and my first reaction was 'Fine - I've been through this too many times. I can't change your mind. I can't live your life for you. You're gone in your direction. I'm going to pick up; I'm going to go in my direction. I'm not going to live in the past. I'm not going to embrace the pain. You go, I'll go, and that will be it.' And I felt that way for an hour and 10 minutes."
"I don't really drink very much, although I have abused alcohol in the past."
"I remember in my early 20s when I felt I couldn't live past 30. I was learning how to write. I had a lot of hard work ahead of me."
"Because men, compared to male chimps, have such relatively small testicles (large testicles indicate a species where many males mate, one after the other, with the same female), we might guess that promiscuous societies were uncommon in the immediate human past."
"I can't re-examine work I did in the past with pride."
"Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us."
"The American people care about the fact that we have $17 trillion in debt and 10 percent of every tax dollar that's coming in is going to pay for past overspending."
"I have a sordid past."
"Empires are doomed. They become more diffuse, more broke, demagogues rule, and so I was just pointing out some similarities between past empires and what's going on right now. They all have had to apply more and more harsh rhetoric of superiority and divine right to justify the building of hegemony."
"Press on! If Fortune play thee false To-day, tomorrow she'll be true; Whom now she sinks she now exalts, Taking old gifts and granting new, The wisdom of the present hour Makes up the follies past and gone; To weakness, strength succeeds, and power From frailty springs! Press on, press on!"
"Enjoy the present hour, be mindful of the past; And neither fear nor wish the Approaches of the last. Learn of the skillful: He that teaches himself, hath a fool for his master."
"... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias."
"Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own."
"Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole."
"I get a little heated when I talk about the past. But I wanted to be clear - I'm not mad at anybody - not anymore."
