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 Future is distant, like the Past, and therefore sentimental. The mere element "Past" must be retained to sponge up and absorb our melancholy. Everything absent, remote, requiring projection in the veiled weakness of the mind, is sentimental."
"Carbon-free energy is simply something we have to do. The time for talk is past. If we turn around net carbon emissions by 2020 rather than 2040, we get another 2° of fever rather than 3° - and that's a big difference."
"My main concern is the political dimension of European integration. This is one of the most important issues of all, as far as I'm concerned. It has to do with our past, with our sensitivity, perhaps even our hypersensitivity in this regard."
"There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past."
"There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition."
"It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world."
"In its mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea - to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end."
"For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future... Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time."
"I don't harp on what I could change about the past, because I can't go back and change it. But definitely a lot of things I would change."
"I try to update as much as possible. You don't want to be in the past."
"The past was the past; there was no escaping your beginnings."
"This isn’t happening to you, princess,” Sabine snapped before I could do more than shake my head. “This is happening to us. While you spent the past few months prancing around in ignorant bliss, we were all being possessed, or kidnapped, or stalked by this hellion. So dry your tears and take off the tiara, because this is a call to arms, not a pity party. You’re not going to find any sympathy here."
"As a man and as a sports figure, you have to set limits and set boundaries on what can and cannot happen. Once you do that, your family will start to respect you. 'OK, I get it, he's all about football and handling his business,' and that's what I've done. In the past, when I was a young man - a younger man - it was hard for me to say no. Since I'm older, wiser, I know how to handle people, know how to say no, know when something is right and something wrong. I use proper judgment."
"I don't think about the past, I only think about the present because what I do today sets me up for the future."
"In that moment I know exactly what I want; I want to peel away all the layers of clothing between us, strip away everything that separates us, the past and the present and the future."
"The past has too much knowledge embedded in it, and therefore it's best to forget it and start anew."
"Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past."
"How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?"
"In saying no to progress, it is not the future which they condemn, but themselves. They give themselves a melancholy disease; they inoculate themselves with the past. There is but one way of refusing tomorrow, that is to die."
"When you run into someone that you used to be in love with, all that you have is drama, desperation and not know what to do."
