Past quotes
10.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one."
"In the future, as in the past, the great ideas [of mathematics] must be simplifying ideas, the creator must always be one who clarifies, for himself, and for others, the most complicated issues of formulas and concepts."
"No matter what you have gone through in your youth, it is about who you choose to be in life. You can define your own destiny. You can be stronger than a very difficult past and overcome it."
"Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo."
"The investor of today does not profit from yesterday's growth."
"As for ISIS, we know where they come from. We know who has used them in the past. We know their sectarianism leads to killings. Here the Turkish state, like its NATO bosses, has helped to create a monster that it now claims to oppose."
"None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone."
"There is neither Past nor Future. There is only the Present."
"I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past - a combination of both."
"I would say a must-do in Canada would be to go skiing at Whistler in Vancouver. You could take a chair lift for like a half hour to the top of this mountain and you ski down, it takes like so long to get to the bottom. You go past the clouds. It's absolutely incredible."
"Walking on the moon is now something that people used to do, in the distant past, like macramé, decoupage and the Hustle.... There will just be the pictures, then, as we saw them in the summer of '69, ghostly and blurry, colorless and incomprehensible, an infant's glimpse of a new world."
"A garden is a result of an arrangement of natural materials according to aesthetic laws; interwoven throughout are the artist's outlook on life, his past experiences, his affections, his attempts, his mistakes and his successes."
"The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing."
"Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation."
"I don't want to be a slave to electronic devices. I don't want to be connected to my friends. I don't want to send snapshots of my dog and cute pictures of my family life to my friends and family. I don't want to be liked, by pushing a button. I use all of this technology to basically replace devices that I had in the past which worked just fine."
"The past is something for you to learn from and the future is something that you hope is going to happen, but I'm always speaking to my actual fans in present tense."
"The justice of our cause must be reflected in the manner in which we rectify the crimes of the past."
"The Past is gone and the future might not even be, the only thing we ever experience is the now, I try to enjoy the minute."
"Don't forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars."
"In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit."
