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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"Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn."
"The past is the past. Don't let it kill you."
"God cannot alter the past, though historians can."
"All personal breakthroughs begin with a change in beliefs. So how do we change? The most effective way is to get your brain to associate massive pain to the old belief. You must feel deep in your gut that not only has this belief cost you pain in the past, but it's costing you in the present and, ultimately, can only bring you pain in the future. Then you must associate tremendous pleasure to the idea of adopting a new, empowering belief."
"Remember: we all get what we tolerate. So stop tolerating excuses within yourself, limiting beliefs of the past, or half-assed or fearful states."
"Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past any excuse to change any and every part of your life in an instant."
"But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future."
"The challenge of the unknown future is so much more exciting than the stories of the accomplished past."
"Think of something new you’ve actually learned in the past week; if you can’t think of anything, get comfortable where you’re at because you’re not going anywhere. To stop learning is to stop living."
"I never answer if someone knocks on my door and only the band and my manager have my phone number. In any case my phone doesn't ring so I never notice it. I occasionally just walk past and pick it up to see if anyone's there."
"Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through."
"How you see your future is much more important that what has happened in your past."
"The past is always an invented land."
"I don't want to do anything over again, ever again. I want only to do what I haven't done. There's no "again." There's only the future. I hate the past - especially my own past."
"The one charm of the past is that it is the past."
"To insist on a spiritual practice that served you in the past is to carry the raft on your back after you have crossed the river."
"If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything. When a child presents himself to you with his smile, if you are not really there - thinking about the future or the past, or preoccupied with other problems - then the child is not really there for you. The technique of being alive is to go back to yourself in order for the child to appear like a marvellous reality. Then you can see him smile and you can embrace him in your arms."
"Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar."
"It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present and a waste to live in the future."
"We're now the results of our past actions, and in the future we'll be the results of the actions we're performing now."
