Motivational Quotes

Past

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

- Reagan, Ronald

Best Quotes about Past

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

The past, though it cannot be relived, can always be repaired.

La Farge, John

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

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

Rich, Adrienne

They spend their time looking forward to the past.

Osborne, John

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

Posterity will pay everyone their due.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

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

I cannot sing the old songs, Or dream those dreams again,

Barnard, Charlotte

10.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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

Martial, Marcus Valerius

12.

In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.

Gorky, Maxim

13.

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

Campolo, Tony

14.

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

Schuller, Robert H.

15.

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.

Benjamin, Walter

16.

You must never regret what might have been. The past that did not happen is as hidden from us as the future we cannot see.

Stern, Richard Martin

17.

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

18.

Losers live in the past. Winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present toward the future.

Waitley, Denis

19.

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

Douglass, Frederick

20.

If you're still hanging onto a dead dream of yesterday, laying flowers on its grave by the hour, you cannot be planting the seeds for a new dream to grow today.

Chapman, Joyce

21.

The past does not equal the future.

Robbins, Anthony

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Barzan, Gerald

25.

Nothing is as new as something which as been long forgotten.

Proverb, German

26.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

27.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

28.

The good of other times let people state; I think it lucky I was born so late.

Ovid

29.

Things without remedy, should be without regard; what is done, is done.

Shakespeare, William

30.

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

King Jr. Martin Luther

31.

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

32.

May you look back on the past with as much pleasure as you look forward to the future.

Dickson, Paul

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Fredrich

38.

Nostalgia is a seductive liar.

Ball, George W.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The people who get into trouble in our company are those who carry around the anchor of the past.

Welch, John

42.

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

43.

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

Givens, Charles J.

44.

The next day is never so good as the day before.