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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"If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details."
"You can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people."
"I can't live off of yesterday - that's in the past."
"I don't feel like I ever really do get past the nervousness. I'm always nervous. Something about being nervous keeps you on the edge, and I've always felt like I worked better under pressure."
"I can't do anything about my past, but I can do a lot to cooperate with my destiny. I am re-created in Christ Jesus, born anew, that I might do the good works that he laid out for me and live the good life."
"As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off."
"Time is painted with a lock before, and bald behind, signifying thereby that we must take time by the forelock; for, when it is once past, there is no recalling it."
"It might be plausibly maintained, that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied."
"Children see in their parents the past, their parents see in them the future; and if we find more love in the parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad but natural. Who does not entertain his hopes more than his recollections."
"I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence."
"Oh, God, Alaska, I love you. I love you,' and the Colonel whispered, 'I'm so sorry, Pudge. I know you did,' and I said, 'No. Not past tense."
"The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past."
"The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past ... Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways."
"Words enable us to transfer our thoughts from inside our own mind into the mind of another. They have the power to alter history, to describe the past, and to bring meaning and substance to the present."
"I know people will think it's funny because I've done glamour modelling in the past, but I felt embarrassed about my body and just wanted to cover it up."
"I was told when I went for a life-insurance exam when I was 18 that I was not likely to live past 50, so I refused to pay the premium."
"Fancy rules over two thirds of the universe, the past, and future, while reality is confined to the present"
"Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones"
"I have some stuff that I've been working on the past year or two, but I haven't put anything together into songs or anything like that. Maybe it'll turn into letters to the president, I don't really know what it'll turn into."
"I've done collaborations with Scott [Morgan, aka Loscil] in the past, but it is something that kind of appeals to me these days."
