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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"The whole blear world of smoke and twisted steel around my head in a railroad car, and my mind wandering past the rust into futurity: I saw the sun go down in a carnal and primeval world, leaving darkness to cover my railroad train because the other side of the world was waiting for dawn."
"To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations."
"If something's going to happen for you, it will, you can't make it happen. And it never does happen until you're past the point where you care whether it happens or not. I guess it's for our own good that it always happens that way, because after you stop wanting things is when having them won't make you go crazy."
"...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you."
"I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float."
"I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence. Intuition, suspicion, or confidence in new ventures; there is a strange strain within me when advantage is not taken of some situation, the immediacy of recognition of the rightness or wrongness of a mood, a response, a decision - they are so often valid that I am increasingly convinced that we have yet to grasp the reality of existence."
"Posterity will say as usual: "In the past things were better, the present is worse than the past."
"Time past, even God is deprived of the power of recalling."
"You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind."
"I am far too much in doubt about the present, far too perturbed .about the future, to be otherwise than profoundly reverential about the past."
"When it comes to fully understanding how to strategically move all the pieces on the marketing and distribution chess board on a worldwide basis, Jeff Blake is always thinking two moves ahead and that gives Sony a true competitive edge. He is the studio's secret weapon and while he would be the first to credit his fantastic sales and marketing team, there are few executives here that deserve more credit for our successes during the past several years than Jeff."
"I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences."
"All the past we leave behind; We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O Pioneers!"
"We've had public companies in the past in that business and they bleed. We've got a lot more blood than they do."
"What motivates most gold purchasers is their belief that the ranks of the fearful will grow. During the past decade that belief has proved correct. Beyond that, the rising price has on its own generated additional buying enthusiasm, attracting purchasers who see the rise as validating an investment thesis. As 'bandwagon' investors join any party, they create their own truth - for a while."
"Our future rates of gain will fall far short of those achieved in the past. Berkshire's capital base is now simply too large to allow us to earn truly outsized returns. If you believe otherwise, you should consider a career in sales but avoid one in mathematics."
"Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine."
"The past isn't over. It isn't even past."
"Like Spain, I am bound to the past."
"And by that destiny to perform an act Whereof what's past is prologue, what to come In yours and my discharge."
