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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"You'll see that it'll take more than five and a half months to wipe away peel;scrape away the blanket of ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those brains in the past three hundred years. You'll see."
"You push so far past the normal boundaries of what’s O.K. in society. I’m always fully aware of, ‘You can’t do this’… When someone really believes in what they’re saying, but it’s crazy, it’s like my favorite thing on earth… [But] Crazy’s just crazy and there’s nowhere to go. You can have a point of view, it can be very strange, but we have to know your reasoning."
"Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles."
"The family today counts for less and less. Why? Who knows - the growth of science, the Cold War, the atomic bomb, the world war we've made, the new philosophies we've created; certainly something is happening to man, so why go against it, why oblige this new man to live by the mechanisms and regulations of the past?"
"They say that Hope is happiness But genuine Love must prize the past; And Mem'ry wakes the thoughts that bless: They rose first -- they set the last. And all that mem'ry loves the most Was once our only hope to be: And all that hope adored and lost Hath melted into memory. Alas! It is delusion all-- The future cheats us from afar: Nor can we be what we recall, Nor dare we think on what we are."
"Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast, But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past."
"The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing."
"Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.” Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future."
"It's hard to believe that, in the 1970's, America was virtually hunger-free. During the past two decades, we have allowed hunger to attack our most precious resource, our children. We must reinstate and strengthen programs to eliminate this blight on our society."
"To observe the world carefully, to write a lot and often, on a schedule if necessary, to use the dictionary a lot, to look up word origins, to analyze closely the work of writers you admire, to read not only contemporaries but writers of the past, to learn at least one foreign language, to live an interesting life outside of writing."
"I have never had time for the idea of searching. Whenever I wanted to express something, I did so without thinking of the past or the future."
"All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines."
"It's all love or sex these days. Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity. Soon friends will be like the elves and the pixies - fabulous mythical creatures from a distant past."
"It takes more to make one sage today than it did to make the seven of Greece. And you need more resources to deal with a single person these days than with an entire nation in times past."
"The false self lives mainly through memory and anticipation. Past and future are its main preoccupation."
"When you are fully present with everyone you meet, you relinquish the conceptual identity you made for them - your interpretation of who they are and what they did in the past - and are able to interact without the egoic movements of desire and fear. Attention, which is alert stillness, is the key."
"I feel like the sixties is about to happen. It feels like a period in the future to me, rather than a period in the past."
"Visit your soul; don't visit your past."
"But time, as well as healing all wounds, taught me something strange too: that it's possible to love more than one person in a lifetime. I remarried. I'm very happy with my new wife, and I can't imagine living without her. This, however, doesn't mean that I have to renounce all my past experiences, as long as I'm careful not to compare my two lives. You can't measure love the way you can the length of a road or the height of a building."
"A little more patience, a little more charity for all, a little more devotion, a little more love; with less bowing down to the past, and a silent ignoring of pretended authority; brave looking forward to the future with more faith in our fellows, and the race will be ripe for a great burst of light and life."
