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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"You can’t say ‘if this didn’t happen then that would have happened’ because you don’t know everything that might have happened. You might think something’d be good, but for all you know it could have turned out horrible. You can’t say ‘If only I’d…’ because you could be wishing for anything. The point is, you’ll never know. You’ve gone past. So there’s no use thinking about it."
"Man just went past with a cat on his head."
"If the government ever imposes a tax on books - and I wouldn't put it past them - I'm in dead trouble."
"Thus through half-belief, we are often doomed to repeat that very past we should have learned from."
"A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past."
"I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past."
"When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past."
"Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer."
"Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future."
"Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy."
"We face the future with our past and our present as guarantors of our promises; and we are content to stand or to fall by the record which we have made and are making."
"I take references from the past and flip them."
"My training has been going really well these past few days and my goal is to keep it up for the next few weeks and hopefully earn a spot on the U.S. Olympic team."
"Whose best and most fruitful gift was the power of admiration, which made it possible for me to learn. Now, as in my youth, I am looking up to the truly great creations of the past, which I see high above my own and which alone deserve the name of greatness."
"In the past, I was definitely more apt to storing pain away and not worrying about it. But as I get older, it's really about figuring out how to process it, how to feel it, and then also how to use it in my art."
"Cherish [Science], venerate her, follow her methods faithfully ... and the future of this people will be greater than the past."
"Of the few innocent pleasures left to men past middle life, the jamming of common sense down the throats of fools is perhaps the keenest."
"The past stays put, I just keep moving farther away from it."
"I see no comfort in outliving one's friends, and remaining a mere monument of the times which are past."
"History teaches the young the virtues of freedom. By apprising them of the past it will enable them to judge the future."
