Past quotes
10.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"A man who has broken with his past feels a different man. He will not feel it a shame to confess his past wrongs, for the simple reason that these wrongs do not touch him at all."
"I do not seek redemption from the consequences of my sin. I seek to be redeemed from sin itself. Until I have attained that end, I shall be content to be restless."
"The wise man looks back into the past, and does not grieve over what is far off, nor rejoice over what is near; for he knows that time is without end."
"But the past is long, and the future is short."
"There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as though a chink in the dark: light out of the past. It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice agin, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things."
"I am only 33, I've got a lot to do. This is the first half of my career. I'm looking forward to the future and I'm proud about the past."
"You aren't your past, you are probability of your future."
"If you live in the past and allow the past to define who you are, then you never grow."
"There's nobody who would be willing to do an interview on a regular basis that you can't go and Google and find out what has happened to them in the past week. There's nobody."
"Lands' End has undergone three major changes over the past couple of decades. The first was the introduction of an 800 number, in 1978; the second was express delivery, in 1994; and the third was the introduction of a Web site, in 1995. The first two innovations cut the average transaction time-the time between the moment of ordering and the moment the goods are received-from three weeks to four days. The third innovation has cut the transaction time from four days to, well, four days."
"In stating that the idea of a separate state is not practical, I'm also stating that the idea of integration, forced integration, as they've been making an effort to do in this country for the past years, is also just as impractical."
"All of the civil rights problems during the past years have created a situation where America right now is moving toward a police state. You can't have anything otherwise. So that's your supposition."
"I like today and perhaps a little future still, but the past is really something I'm not interested in. So, as far as I'm concerned, I like only the past of things and people I don't know. When I know, I don't care because I knew how it was."
"Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much."
"The things we are attached to are no more than shadows of the past."
"There are moments in history when brooding tragedy and its dark shadows can be lightened by recalling great moments of the past."
"A film causes me so many worries and such a lot of reactions that I have to love it in order to get over it and past it."
"... we may remember what the Romansthought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past."
"None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history."
"Part of you wants to look over at the people watching and say, "Not bad, huh? Me and Clint Eastwood." But you have to get past that and just be an actor."
