45+ Quotes on the Past
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
You have to know the past to understand the present.
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.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
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.
The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
One faces the future with one's past.
Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.
The best of prophets of the future is the past.
The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.
The past may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.
How you played in yesterday's game is all that counts.
The past is not a package one can lay away.
Things without remedy, should be without regard; what is done, is done.
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
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.
A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.
You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.
Consider the past and you shall know the future.
To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
One's past is what one is.
One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
Study the past if you would divine the future.
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?
The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.
O who knows what slumbers in the background of the times?
Clogged with yesterday's excess, the body drags the mind down with it.
All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put the past together again. So let's remember: Don't try to saw sawdust.
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.
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.
I'm growing old, I delight in the past.
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.
Whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it.
No man is rich enough to buy back his 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.
I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
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.
