Past quotes

Past

10.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

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Past quotes (page 124 of 526)

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Past

"I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to 'succeed'-and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills-domestic, professional and personal-then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last."

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Past

"One hurries through, even though there's time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present."

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Past

"It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty."

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Past

"Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand."

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Past

"There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition."

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Faith Hill Singer, Songwriter
Past

"There are things I've done in the past I'm not proud of - and I could talk about them if I wanted to - but I don't reveal my secrets... I prefer certain things to remain personal; there have to be boundaries. And I don't think you need a scandal to have an interesting story."

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Past

"There's a lot of stuff that I've been through in my life in the past couple of months that I don't really want to share with people who are close to me, but I have no option if it's my art."

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Zadie Smith Novelist, Essayist
Past

"In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution."

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Zadie Smith Novelist, Essayist
Past

"Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable."

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Oliver Stone Filmmaker, Screenwriter
Past

"I have skipped from style to style from film to film, and I love doing that because it's given me the ability to free myself from the past. Perhaps one of the worst feelings that I can have is the feeling that I'm locked in, like a prisoner of myself, which is something we all feel at some point in our lives. So part of making those stylistic jumps is just to free myself up-to get away from the old or the old Oliver Stone."

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Oliver Stone Filmmaker, Screenwriter
Past

"I'd rather get past the tyranny of now, where you get judged for something based on what's happening at the moment."

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Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Physician, Poet, Essayist
Past

"Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!"

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