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 biggest challenge is how to get people to wake up and realize this is a one-shot deal. If we fail, we are witting participants in the biggest experiment humans have ever done: moving CO2 levels to twice their value in the past 670.000 years and hoping it turns out okay for generations to come."
"Yesterday I visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart. The present is burdened too much with the past."
"All cats can see futures, and see echoes of the past. We can watch the passage of creatures from the infinity of now, from all the worlds like ours, only fractionally different. And we follow them with our eyes, ghost things, and the humans see nothing."
"One of the most significant events in our distant past is still perhaps the greatest mystery: the origins of life itself."
"Let go the past, let go the future, and let go the present (front, back, middle). Crossing to the farther shore of existence, with mind released everywhere, do not further undergo birth and decay."
"South Africans must recall the terrible past so that we can deal with it, forgiving where forgiveness is necessary but never forgetting."
"We don't have to be victims of our past, that we can let go of our bitterness, and that all of us can achieve greatness."
"We recall the joy and excitement of a nation that had found itself, the collective relief that we had stepped out of our restrictive past, and the expectant air of walking into a brighter future."
"The man who commands efficiently must have obeyed others in the past, and the man who obeys dutifully is worthy of someday being a commander."
"It is pleasant to recall past troubles."
"Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches."
"Connie Smith and I have worked a lot of shows together in the past, and it will be nice to do that again"
"Philosophy easily triumphs over past and future ills; but present ills triumph over philosophy."
"A married man is a man with a past, while a bachelor is a man with a future."
"If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment."
"Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present."
"Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair."
"Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed."
"Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity."
"There's a grip we sometimes some of us get on our pain and suffering and our past and our wounding that we over-identify with it. If we laugh at it, we're saying, "Oh, I'm laughing at myself, which means my victimhood isn't all of who I am.""
