"The present moment contains past and future. The secret of transformation, is in the way we handle this very moment."
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 78 of 526)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Consider in what condition both in body and soul a man should be when he is overtaken by death; and consider the shortness of life, the boundless abyss of time past and future, the feebleness of all matter."
"It is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone. Even this burden, too, can be lessened if you confine it strictly to its own limits."
"No one can lose either the past or the future - how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess? ... It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived: and if this is all he has, he cannot lose what he does not have."
"Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past."
"The memory of past troubles is pleasant. [Lat., Jucunda memoria est praeteritorum malorum.]"
"The hours pass and the days and the months and the years, and the past time never returns."
"Everyone remembers his past with greater vividness as the present becomes more important. Dying men in their last delirium are supposed to see their whole life spread out before them."
"I'm not inspired by space in that kind of futuristic sense, but I've never liked retro. Of course, we always get references from the past, but that doesn't mean that the clothes have to look like the past. We need to look forward, which is why I'm fascinated by new materials, technologies, techniques, and unusual ways to use colors or textures."
"You are not your past, not your habits, not your compulsions. When you get to know who you are, anything becomes possible."
"The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory."
"Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard."
"In history, we are concerned with what has been and what is; in philosophy, however, we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or to the future, but with that which is, both now and eternally in short, with reason."
"We sometimes condemn the present, by praising the past; and show our contempt of what is now, by our esteem for what is no more."
"Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it."
"Cut the umbilical cord to yesterday. Although we can't change history, we change the effect the past has on the future."
"It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls."
"For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities - a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces - a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life."
"Breed is stronger than pasture."
"Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and predator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself - a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred."