Past quotes
10.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside past — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"If, in all the cities, every house that is past repairing could be pulled down or burned up, how great would be the crash, how heaven-high the conflagration. It would be a veritable crack of Doom and glare of the Judgment."
"Live today. Let go of your attachment to your past as an excuse for your life conditions today. You are the product of the choices you are making right now."
"Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."
"To mourn a mischief that is past and gone Is the next way to draw new mischief on."
"Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present."
"Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past Into different lives, or into any future; You are not the same people who left that station Or who will arrive at any terminus, While the narrowing rails slide together behind you."
"To understand the living present, and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past."
"The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them."
"I myself believe that there is in every painter's life a period of making absurdities. In my case I think that period is already long past."
"A contempt of the monuments and the wisdom of the past, may be justly reckoned one of the reigning follies of these days, to which pride and idleness have equally contributed."
"Sir, sorrow is inherent in humanity. As you cannot judge two and two to be either five, or three, but certainly four, so, when comparing a worse present state with a better which is past, you cannot but feel sorrow. It is not cured by reason, but by the incursion of present objects, which bear out the past."
"He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground."
"When a man marries a widow his jealousies revert to the past: no man is as good as his wife says her first husband was"
"At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colors are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little-understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colors always smell slightly of boiled cabbage—even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity."
"Out of the nursery into the college and back into the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more."
"Today, there's an expectation that you get to know public people. In the past, it was much more what you did and how you presented yourself."
"The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable."
"The past is always attractive because it is drained of fear."
"History by apprising them [the people] of the past will enable them to judge of the future. . . . It will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men: it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views."
"The idea of losing someone that you love could throw you into a situation where you could not see your future and you really would be living in the past."
