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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"In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment."
"Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past."
"I think seeing some of the past can be helpful, especially if you're into crime solving."
"It is bad enough to know the past; it would be intolerable to know the future."
"If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us; yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one."
"What's down below is in the past Like last night's crickets, far below."
"And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are."
"The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?"
"The past, the future, majesty, love - if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them."
"It's easy to identify many investment managers with great recent records. But past results, though important, do not suffice when prospective performance is being judged. How the record has been achieved is crucial."
"I don't really think that, as a society, we [americans] want to confer blessings on generation after generation who contribute nothing to society, simply because somebody in the far distant past happened to amass a great sum of wealth."
"Guilt lies in the past, worry lies in the future."
"To be born again is to let the past go, and look without condemnation upon the present."
"People lose track of their purpose, because they are so back there - living in their past."
"Even if you are loaded down with guilt about everything you did in the past, you still are experiencing the guilt in the moment."
"How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten."
"But O, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good."
"Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war?"
"You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is."
"A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast."
