Past quotes
10.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside past — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Most people, who have quit smoking, have had at least one unsuccessful try in the past. It is not important how many times you try to quit. The only important thing is, that eventually you stay quit"
"Prolong not the past Invite not the future Do not alter your innate wakefulness Fear not appearances There in nothing more than this"
"He is never born, never dies, without beginning or end, eternal and infinite. Through all times, past, present and future, He remains the same. The origin and dissolution of the Universe is all within him. Nothing exists without his existence. He is everything."
"My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There's an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there's enough of the present included to lull the reader."
"Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors."
"What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all."
"I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world."
"It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present."
"Life, to be worthy of a rational being, must be always in progression; we must always purpose to do more or better than in time past."
"Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me, and far from my friends be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Ionia."
"Complaints are vain; we will try to. do better another time. To-morrow and to-morrow. A few designs and a few failures, and the time of designing is past."
"One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memories of the past."
"So different are the colors of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past; and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side."
"Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions"
"Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?"
"There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in."
"Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that"
"Juliet's version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding and was seldom seen."
"I MAY HAVE ALLOWED MYSELF SOME FLICKER OF EMOTION IN THE RECENT PAST, said Death, BUT I CAN GIVE IT UP ANY TIME I LIKE."
"There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; ocassionally, however, there are alternate pasts."
