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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"The library was a little old shaby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the cmbined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass."
"Hopefully, whether it's energy or child vaccines, the case of the many benefits helping countries so that they are stable, so these refugee problems that have been troubling for Europe - a little less so for the U.S. but, even so, a lot of controversy there - these things are why the future's going to be better than the past. People really do look to the United States, so we'll be there making the case."
"Even for the diseases we don't focus on, cancer, heart disease, you're going to be way better off being sick 10 years from now than any time in the past."
"The first trip I remember taking was on the train from Virginia up to New York City, watching the summertime countryside rolling past the window. They used white linen tablecloths in the dining car in those days, and real silver. I love trains to this day. Maybe that was the beginning of my fixation with leisurely modes of travel."
"I haven't been faithful to my own advice in the past. I will in the future."
"Get past all the emotions that come along with the experience and get to the important stuff. Recognize what it is that you want, put a game plan together and take those steps to making a quality choice."
"The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim."
"I surround myself with inspirational quotations. This easy-to-follow piece of advice has played a huge role in my being able to get past my own fears and insecurities throughout my entrepreneurial career."
"Beyond here lies nothin' But the mountains of the past"
"Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's there"
"With Metavoid, I wanted to move forward with the Lustmord sound, rather than recreating past works such as Heresy or Black Stars, I wanted to create a sound that was new, but which was also unmistakably Lustmord. It's for others to decide if I failed or succeeded."
"Hey, little dolly with the blue jeans on, I want to ramrod with you, honey, 'til half past dawn."
"Fear is always the result of an unquestioned past imagined as a future."
"For me, the future lives only here in my mind, as thoughts and images, just as the past does, and I love those thoughts and the world that it produces. I am entirely optimistic about the future."
"Another boat, a straight-four, four sweep oarsmen without a coxswain, raced through our flotilla. I looked at them as they jetted past, and I quickly looked again. This boat appeared to be manned by four skeletons. Their cheek bones stood out like knots, their ribs were clearly defined as if they were painted on. Every leg and arm muscle showed as taut as steel cabling. Four pairs of deep-set eyes peered at us, conveying 'the look.' The four men who were rowing that shell were a special breed of oarsmen known as 'lightweights'."
"We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us."
"In the past it never occurred to me that every casual remark of mine would be snatched up and recorded. Otherwise I would have crept further into my shell."
"In the past we have tried to make a distinction between animals which we acknowledge have some value and other which, having none, can be liquidated when we wish. This standard must be abandoned. Everything that lives has value simply as a living thing, as one of the manifestations of the mystery that is life."
"I have given up the ambition to be a great scholar. I want to be more- simply a human. . . . We are not true humans, but beings who live by a civilization inherited from the past, that keeps us hostage, that confines us. No freedom of movement. Nothing. Everything in us is killed by our calculations for our future, by our social position and cast. You see, I am not happy-yet I am happy. I suffer, but that is part of life. I live, I don't care about my existence, and that is the beginning of wisdom."
"The critics don't interest me because they're concerned with what's past and done, while I'm concerned with what comes next."
