Past quotes
10.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Every event has a purpose and every setback a lesson. Failure is essential to personal expansion. It brings inner growth and a whole host of psychic rewards. Never regret your past. Rather embrace it as the teacher it is."
"Our past can control today and tomorrow only to the degree we allow it. The past should not be a place where we dwell but a place from which we learn all we can and then move on."
"While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future."
"The life of this world is nothing but the harmony of opposites"
"The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn."
"I believe in any kind of personal growth practice that can help you gather the tools that you can then apply to resentment, anger, pain, and rage in order to heal your past resentments toward yourself and others, and then deal with them in the moment so you don't carry them for a decade or more."
"Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself."
"And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name; let us call it the Fullness of Time."
"Let me realize that my past failures at follow-through are no indication of my future performance. They're just healthy little fires that are gonna warm up my ass"
"I will not walk backward in life."
"I sip the Dom P watching Gandhi til I'm charged - writing in my book of rhymes, all the words past the margin"
"As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy-nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a-brewing and swallow it you must."
"The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone."
"Dressing up is a bore. At a certain age, you decorate yourself to attract the opposite sex, and at a certain age, I did that. But I'm past that age."
"Do not pursue the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. The past no longer is. The future has not yet come. Looking deeply at life as it is. In the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom. We must be diligent today. To wait until tomorrow is too late. Death comes unexpectedly. How can we bargain with it? The sage calls a person who knows how to dwell in mindfulness night and day, 'one who knows the better way to live alone.'"
"No matter what the past has dealt you, don't let it destroy your future."
"The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand"
"If we try to think back to the dim and distant past... what is it that helps us reconstruct those times, and to picture the lives of those who lived in them? It is their art... It is thanks to the hand, the companion of the mind, that civilization has arisen."
"Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples."
"For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?"
