Past Quotes

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.”
― Bill Keane

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.”
― Mother Theresa

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“The past is never where you think you left it.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.”
― Gautama Buddha, Sayings of Buddha

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.”
― George Harrison

“Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that... there are many kinds of magic, after all.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it.”
― Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Study the past if you would define the future.”
― Confucius

“My past is everything I failed to be.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“The past can't hurt you anymore, not unless you let it.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.”
― William Golding

“You’re just another story I can’t tell anymore.”
― pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You

“Sooner or later we've all got to let go of our past.”
― Dan Brown, Deception Point

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.”
― Barbara Taylor Bradford, Unexpected Blessings

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road