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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"What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road."
"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened - that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death."
"Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time."
"Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable."
"The cloud that descended on Black Rock on Monday was not for the past but the future. How much will this debacle chill the pursuit of other risky investigations?"
"If you’re really looking for answers, look past me. But if you’re interested in how I got to where I am, I will be as honest as possible."
"Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long term survival, is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space."
"My goal, if I was going to do art, fine art, would have been to become Picasso or greater. That always sounds so funny to people, comparing yourself to someone in the past that has done so much, and in your life you’re not even allowed to think that you can do as much. That’s a mentality that suppresses humanity."
"Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges."
"The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow."
"The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell."
"The depth of experience fine wine can bring to a dinner, particularly a bottle that has been through the past 100 years, makes you take stock of your own life."
"Rivers are places that renew our spirit, connect us with our past, and link us directly with the flow and rhythm of the natural world."
"The meeting of two eternities, the past and future....is precisely the present moment."
"I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years."
"My call is not to those who believe they belong to the past. My call is to those who believe in the future."
"This war is not as in the past: whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system."
"Religion is like our appendix, a vestigial remnant from a primitive past. Perhaps in a few millennia the god of Abraham will invoke the same curious amusement as rain and sun gods do today. Or perhaps our god will simply be shelved along with Zeus and Jupiter. Some day. But until then, we suffer the consequences of a population that believes in the absence of evidence and, more curiously, rejects an objective reality that conflicts with beliefs easily proven false."
"History is the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instructor of the present, and monitor to the future."
"The road to the promised land runs past Sinai."
