Past quotes

Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time when you are called home for dinner, past the time of doing chores, past the time when your body betrays you past time itself.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

So this anchoring in some way, in some important way in the past without repeating the past, but on the basis of the past building something new: that is what is important.

From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.

You must learn from your past mistakes, but not lean on your past successes.

Conventionally, one looks at history as something of the past. But after Einstein, who knows what is in the past and what is in the present?

Where the mind is past hope, the heart is past shame.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.

What is past is past, there is a future left to all men, who have the virtue to repent and the energy to atone.

The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.

The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

The beauty of the past belongs to the past.

The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn't be in flashback.

It's in the act of having to do things that you don't want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

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.

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

We have all examined our past critically and are very much aware of even the unpleasant things. Now, we need to look at what we plan to do with the lessons we have learned from the past.

I like today and perhaps a little future still, but the past is really something I'm not interested in. So, as far as I'm concerned, I like only the past of things and people I don't know. When I know, I don't care because I knew how it was.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

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.

I know not why there is such a melancholy feeling attached to the remembrance of past happiness, except that we fear that the future can have nothing so bright as the past.

What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.

All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. It is not a case of coming to terms with the past. That is not possible. It cannot be subsequently modified or undone.

People who live in the past generally are afraid to compete in the present. I've got my faults, but living in the past is not one of them. There's no future in it.

Over the past few years, many of us have increasingly begun to question the direction and meaning of our society as it has developed over the past several centuries.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

What happened in the past is just that, the past. Champion or not.

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

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.

But what is past my help is past my care.

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.

The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real links between that past and a future worthy of it.

The 1984 European Championships were held in France and that was something important. I felt on form then, even though I was practically always injured at all the World Cups. It's a great memory. But in any case, the past is past.

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.

Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.

J has told me about his past. I know what happened and why. But he is the one person who made me believe in my talent and whatever happened in the past, he's been a wonderful manager to me.

I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

If you live through the initial stage of fame and get past it, and remember thats not who you are. If you live past that, then you have a hope of maybe learning how to spell the word artist.

Faith may be encouraged by what has happened in the past, or what is thought to have happened in the past, but the only proof of it is in the future.

Past is past.

The past is but the past of a beginning.

Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past.