Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity.
Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.
It is one thing to learn about the past; it is another to wallow in it.
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.
Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.
There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you -- if you don't repeat it.
Nostalgia is a seductive liar.
The past should be a springboard, not a hammock.
I cannot sing the old songs, Or dream those dreams again,
A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.
As lousy as things are now, tomorrow they will be somebody's good old days.
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.
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
Many are always praising the by-gone time, for it is natural that the old should extol the days of their youth; the weak, the time of their strength; the sick, the season of their vigor; and the disappointed, the spring-tide of their hopes.
Yesterday is a canceled check: Forget it. Tomorrow is a promissory note: Don't count on it. Today is ready cash: Use it!
If you are carrying strong feelings about something that happened in your past, they may hinder your ability to live in the present.
The investor of today does not profit from yesterday's growth.
Your past is important, but it is not nearly as important to your present as the way you see your future.
The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.
Study the past if you would divine the future.
May you look back on the past with as much pleasure as you look forward to the future.
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.
We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.
The past always looks better than it was because it isn't here.
The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it.
The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips.
The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward.
— Fredrich
It is not the literal past, the facts of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
To design the future effectively, you must first let go of your past.
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.
Look to the past for guidance into the future.
In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.
I never look back, I look forward.
We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own fortune, and he inherits his own past.
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.
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.
Clogged with yesterday's excess, the body drags the mind down with it.
— Horace
Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but of what men believe happened.
The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
The past, though it cannot be relived, can always be repaired.
To be able to look back upon one's past life with satisfaction is to live twice.
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.
Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.
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.
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
They spend their time looking forward to the past.
If you're going to be able to look back on something and laugh about it, you might as well laugh about it now.
The good of other times let people state; I think it lucky I was born so late.
— Ovid
Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.
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.
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.
There is nothing new, but what has become antiquated.
Nothing is as new as something which as been long forgotten.
Don't brood on the past, but don't forget it either.
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.
While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
The past does not equal the future.
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.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Living in the past has one thing going for it; it's cheaper!
— Saying
Always look at what you have left. Never look at what you have lost.
Look back, and smile at perils past.
Things without remedy, should be without regard; what is done, is done.
We have seen better days.
What is past is prologue.
Fearfulness, contrary to all other vices, maketh a man think the better of another, the worse of himself.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
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.
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.
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.
The next day is never so good as the day before.
Posterity will pay everyone their due.
The function of posterity is to look after itself.
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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).
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.
If you look back too much, you will soon be headed that way
If you must cry over spilled milk then please try to condense it
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
It's very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled the past, and, having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.
The beauty of the past is that it is the past. The beauty of the now is to know it. The beauty of the future is to see where one is going.
The rewards in life go to those who are willing to give up the past
Losers live in the past. Winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present toward the future.
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.
The past is at least secure.
The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
The people who get into trouble in our company are those who carry around the anchor of the 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?
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
Those who do remember it will find new ways to screw it up.
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.
It's linkage I'm talking about, and harmonies and structures, And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.