"What is past is prologue."
Read quote
10 likes
Past quotes
Past
10.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Past
Browse quotes that often appear alongside past — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Past quotes (page 46 of 526)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days."
Read quote
10 likes
"I would not like to live in the past because you don't get anesthetic when you go to the dentist. You don't get antibiotics. You don't get the things that you are used to now, cell phones and televisions and things that are very convenient. You don't want that. But, it would be fun if you could, every now and then, just meet a friend for lunch at Maxim's in Paris in 1900, or go back to 1870 just for a couple of hours, take a walk in the park, and then come right back to Broadway."
Read quote
10 likes
"Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life."
Read quote
10 likes
"Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future."
Read quote
10 likes
"I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life - past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives."
Read quote
10 likes
"The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike."
Read quote
10 likes
"What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can. But mostly I shall use the various tenses of the past. For mostly I do not know, it is perhaps no longer so, it is too soon to know, I simply do not know, perhaps shall never know."
Read quote
10 likes
"Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy."
Read quote
10 likes
"Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do."
Read quote
10 likes
"But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age."
Read quote
10 likes
"Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over."
Read quote
10 likes
"The reality is that who you are is who you are right this second, not who you were at any moment in the past because it doesn't exist anymore. It's done. It's over."
Read quote
10 likes
"First, study the present construction. Second, ask for all past experiences ...study and read everything you can on the subject."
Read quote
10 likes
"I think that Ingersoll had all the attributes of a perfect man, and, in my opinion, no finer personality ever existed. Judging from the past, I cannot help thinking that the intention of the Supreme Intelligence that rules the world is to ultimately make such a type of man universal."
Read quote
10 likes
"In books lies the soul fo the whole past time."
Read quote
10 likes
"The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data."
Read quote
10 likes
"Scientifically, I know beginnings don’t exist. The world is made of energy, which is neither created nor destroyed. Everything she is was here before me. Everything she was will remain. Her existence touches both my past and my future at one point—infinity. Lifelines aren’t lines at all. They’re more like circles. It’s safe to start anywhere and the story will curve its way back to the starting point. Eventually. In other words, it doesn’t matter where I begin. It doesn’t change the end."
Read quote
10 likes
"I wouldn't want to see anything irreparable happen, but I also like it when seemingly irreparable thing occur and men and women find a way to move past it."
Read quote
10 likes
"Had the employers of past generations all of them dealt fairly with their men there would have been no unions."
Read quote
10 likes