Past quotes

Past

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

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Past quotes (page 131 of 526)

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Past

"We count, in the future as in the past, on the driving power of individual initiative, on the incentive of fair private profit, strengthened of course with the acceptance of those obligations to the public interest which rest upon us all."

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Nikki Reed Actress
Past

"I don't want any special powers. I'm powerless. I wouldn't want to see into the future, I wouldn't want to know what anyone was thinking, ever! And I don't want to relive my past."

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Marie Lu Author
Past

"So, tell me,” he whispers. “How fast did you climb those fourteen stories?” Thomas makes a disapproving sound in his throat, but I break into a grin. Storm’s past. Metias loves me again. “Six minutes,” I whisper back to my brother. “And forty-four seconds. How do you like that?” “That must be some sort of record. Not that, you know, you’re supposed to do it."

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Lennox Lewis Professional Boxer
Past

"During the past twenty-three years, I have set a number of goals for myself and I’m proud to say that these goals have been achieved."

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Leo Tolstoy Novelist, Philosopher
Past

"Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past."

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Leo Tolstoy Novelist, Philosopher
Past

"At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future."

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Henri Cole Poet
Past

"Over the past 30 years, hand grenades, tanks, fighter jets, missiles, helicopters and assault rifles have replaced traditional floral patterns in rug making and other textiles. Depicting these realities of war has helped the Afghan people to survive during times of conflict."

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Henri Nouwen Theologian, Author
Past

"When we no longer pray, no longer listen to the voice of love that speaks to us in the moment, our lives become absurd lives in which we are thrown back and forth between the past and the future. If we could just be, for a few minutes each day, fully where we are, we would indeed discover that we are not alone and that the One who is with us wants only one thing: to give us love"

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Henri Nouwen Theologian, Author
Past

"Nuclear man is the man who realizes that his creative powers hold the potential for self-destruction. He sees that in this nuclear age vast new industrial complexes enable man to produce in one hour that which he labored over for years in the past, but he also realizes that these same industries have disturbed the ecological balance and, through air and noise pollution, have contaminated his own milieu."

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George Orwell Writer, Journalist
Past

"A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance, this new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact."

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George Orwell Writer, Journalist
Past

"England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same."

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George Orwell Writer, Journalist
Past

"He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary?"

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George Orwell Writer, Journalist
Past

"He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable"

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George Orwell Writer, Journalist
Past

"The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment."

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George Orwell Writer, Journalist
Past

"The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past."

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George R. R. Martin Novelist, Screenwriter
Past

"Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak."

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George R. R. Martin Novelist, Screenwriter
Past

"I dreamed... in the black of night a man asks all the questions he dare not ask by daylight. For me, the past years, only one question has remained. Why would the gods take my eyes and my strength, yet condemn me to linger on so long, frozen and forgotten? What use could they have for an old done man like me? ... I remember, Sam. I still remember. Remember what? Dragons, Aemon whispered."

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