Past quotes
10.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness."
"To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind."
"There is no greater pain than to remember, in our present grief, past happiness."
"You must learn from your past mistakes, but not lean on your past successes."
"Colleges don't teach economics properly. Unfortunately we learn little from the experience of the past. An economist must know, besides his subject, ethics, logic, philosophy, the humanities and sociology, in fact everything that is part of how we live and react to one another."
"On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, “Natura non facit saltum.” This canon, if we look only to the present inhabitants of the world, is not strictly correct, but if we include all those of past times, it must by my theory be strictly true."
"I don't spend much time regretting the past, once I've taken my lesson from it. I don't dwell on it."
"To be haunted by past failures or satisfied with past successes is to arrest forward motion."
"In 1975,Bob Dylan was almost 10 years past his prime - and then he released the best album of his career, Blood on the Tracks. Written and recorded amid a painful divorce, Blood on the Tracks is proof that heartbreak makes great art - just as many of the albums that followed were the opposite."
"Once you look past the hype, actors are nothing more than fugitives from reality who specialize in contradiction: we are both children and hardened adults—wide-eyed pupils and jaded working stiffs."
"The most simple way to stay encouraged is to feed your heart on what He is doing, not on what He hasn't done. If you can't see what He is doing, feed on what He has done in the past."
"If you insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now."
"Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists, continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time."
"The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We reexperience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can."
"Falling down ain't falling down, If you don't cry when you hit the floor, It's called the past cause I'm getting past, And I ain't nothing like I was before, You ought to see me now"
"If you've got a good enough business, if you have a monopoly newspaper, if you have a network television station - I'm talking of the past - you know, your idiot nephew could run it. And if you've got a really good business, it doesn't make any difference."
"Your lordship, though not clean past your youth, have yet some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltiness of time."
"I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life - past, present, and future."
"What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past."
"Don't think about the past. Just be here now."
