There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternally new now that builds and creates itself out of the Best as the past withdraws.

The past may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

The best of prophets of the future is the past.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

We ought not to look back, unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience.

You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf -- the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.

The debt is paid,
The verdict said,
The Furies laid,
The plague is stayed.
All fortunes made;
Turn the key and bolt the door,
Sweet is death forevermore.
Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin,
Nor murdering hate, can enter in.
All is now secure and fast;
Not the gods can shake the Past
Flies-to the adamantine door
Bolted down forevermore.
None can reenter there,
No thief so politic,
No Satan with a royal trick
Steal in by window, chink, or hole,
To bind or unbind, add what lacked,
Insert a leaf, or forge a name,
New-face or finish what is packed,
Alter or mend eternal Fact.

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.

When we recall the past, we usually find that it is the simplest things - not the great occasions - that in retrospect give off the greatest glow of happiness.

The past is never there when you try to go back. It exists, but only in memory. To pretend otherwise is to invite a mess.

Clogged with yesterday's excess, the body drags the mind down with it.

How you played in yesterday's game is all that counts.

Whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.

Consider the past and you shall know the future.

The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

Study the past if you would divine the future.

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.