past

1.

That's the thing about being a former fat camp champ: when asked if I'd change my past if I could, I always answer no. The pain of being an overweight kid, the humiliation, make you think twice before ever cutting anyone else down.

- Stephanie Klein

2.

To be able to look back upon one's past life with satisfaction is to live twice.

- Martial, Marcus Valerius

3.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.

- George Santayana

4.

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.

- George Carlin

5.

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.

- Tocqueville, Alexis De

6.

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

- Horace

7.

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

- Steinbeck, John

8.

I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was compelled to go to sea, voyage after voyage. Leaves must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being truth itself, is one -- one for all men and for all occupations.

- Conrad, Joseph

9.

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems --but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.

- Rushdie, Salman

10.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

- Roth, Philip

11.

If you must cry over spilled milk then please try to condense it

12.

Four things come not back -- the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.

- Arabian Proverb

13.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

- Jane Austen

14.

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.

- Israel Zangwill

15.

To design the future effectively, you must first let go of your past.

- Givens, Charles J.

16.

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe --though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

- Sontag, Susan

17.

Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present - which seldom happens to us.

- Jean De La Bruyere

18.

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

- Harris, Sidney J.

19.

The difference between the girls today and models of the past is that we are not only interested in fashion: we are going in so many different directions at once. We work harder -- at night and on weekends. [On the modeling profession]

- Schiffer, Claudia

20.

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

- Baldwin, James