Motivational Quotes

Past

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

- Horace

Best Quotes about Past

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?

Whitman, Walt

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.

Bachelard, Gaston

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

King Jr. Martin Luther

Living in the past has one thing going for it; it's cheaper!

Saying

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.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

As lousy as things are now, tomorrow they will be somebody's good old days.

Barzan, Gerald

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

Webb, Mary

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.

Douglass, Frederick

10.

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

Horace

11.

If you are carrying strong feelings about something that happened in your past, they may hinder your ability to live in the present.

Brown, Les

12.

Look to the past for guidance into the future.

Goodkin, Robert Jacob

13.

Because men really respect only that which was founded of old and has developed slowly, he who wants to live on after his death must take care not only of his posterity but even more of his past.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

14.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

15.

Your past is important, but it is not nearly as important to your present as the way you see your future.

Campolo, Tony

16.

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

Guare, John

17.

Those who do remember it will find new ways to screw it up.

Wolfe, Charles

18.

A lot of people go through life like they are rowing a boat. They look at where they have been (the PAST) rather than where they are going (the FUTURE).

19.

What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.

Moon, William Least Heat

20.

That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.

Wordsworth, William

21.

It is not the literal past, the facts of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

Friel, Brian

22.

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.

Hoban, Russell

23.

The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.

Proust, Marcel

24.

Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.

Ade, George

25.

Nostalgia is a seductive liar.

Ball, George W.

26.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

Didion, Joan

27.

While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.

Reagan, Ronald

28.

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects --making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

Sontag, Susan

29.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.

Steiner, George

30.

Always look at what you have left. Never look at what you have lost.

Schuller, Robert H.

31.

Yesterday is a canceled check: Forget it. Tomorrow is a promissory note: Don't count on it. Today is ready cash: Use it!

Bliss, Edwin C.

32.

If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotized by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change.

Hewison, Robert

33.

The past does not equal the future.

Robbins, Anthony

34.

Posterity will pay everyone their due.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

35.

Who so desireth to know what will be hereafter, let him think of what is past, for the world hath ever been in a circular revolution; whatsoever is now, was heretofore; and things past or present, are no other than such as shall be again: Redit orbis in orbem.

Raleigh, Sir Walter

36.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

Berger, John

37.

They spend their time looking forward to the past.

Osborne, John

38.

Mr. Meant-to has a friend, his name is Didn't-Do. Have you met them? They live together in a house called Never-Win. And I am told that it is haunted by the Ghost of Might-have-Been.

Collins, Marva

39.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

Rich, Adrienne

40.

The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

41.

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

Pound, Ezra

42.

The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward.

Fredrich

43.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Einstein, Albert

44.

I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

45.

Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own fortune, and he inherits his own past.