quotations about the past
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
I cannot see, then, any rational or logical ground for that mighty difference in the value which mankind generally set upon the past and future, as if the one was everything, and the other nothing--of no consequence whatever. On the other hand, I conceive that the past is as real and substantial a part of our being, that it is as much a bona fide, undeniable consideration in the estimate of human life, as the future can possibly be. To say that the past is of no importance, unworthy of a moment's regard, because it has gone by, and is no longer anything, is an argument that cannot be held to any purpose; for if the past has ceased to be, and is therefore to be accounted nothing in the scale of good or evil, the future is yet to come, and has never been anything. Should any one choose to assert that the present only is of any value in a strict and positive sense, because that alone has a real existence, that we should seize the instant good, and give all else to the winds, I can understand what he means (though perhaps he does not himself); but I cannot comprehend how this distinction between that which has a downright and sensible, and that which has only a remote and airy existence, can be applied to establish the preference of the future over the past; for both are in this point of view equally ideal, absolutely nothing, except as they are conceived of by the mind's eye, and are thus rendered present to the thoughts and feelings. Nay, the one is even more imaginary, a more fantastic creature of the brain than the other, and the interest we take in it more shadowy and gratuitous; for the future, on which we lay so much stress, may never come to pass at all, that is, may never be embodied into actual existence in the whole course of events, whereas the past has certainly existed once, has received the stamp of truth, and left an image of itself behind.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
"On the Past and Future", Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
When it comes to the past, EVERYONE writes fiction.
STEPHEN KING
Joyland
The past is essentially unknowable: we remake it in our image. Things do not speak for themselves -- we must make them speak.
PAUL MCAULEY
interview, Infinity Plus
While no one can change events that occurred in the past, everyone can change attitudes and beliefs about them.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic
If it is justifiable, and even useful and necessary, to turn back to study our past, it is only in order to establish what we have been and what we must no longer be, what we have believed and thought and what we must no longer believe or think, what we have done and what we must do nevermore.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Since you can't rewrite the past you had better learn to live with it.
FAY WELDON
Godless in Eden: A Book of Essays
It was a dream of perfect bliss
Too beautiful to last;
I seemed to welcome back again
The bright days of the past.
I was a boy--my mimic ship
Sail'd down the village stream,
And I was gay and innocent--
But, ah! it was a dream.
THOMAS HAYNES BAYLY
It Was a Dream
You can't rewrite the past, but you can revise it by looking at it differently.
BARBARA DEANE
Getting Ready for a Great Retirement
We all live on the past, and through the past are destroyed.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The future is there ... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Pattern Recognition
Everyone knows ... that we have fallen far from the brave days of the past.
GENE WOLFE
The Claw of the Conciliator
When then time is passing, it may be perceived and measured; but when it is past, it cannot, because it is not.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Hyperion
The past is gone. It is only an illusion that we can get it back.
DOUG WAGNER
"The Future Is Coming and There Is No Going Back to the Past", The Good Men Project, March 16, 2016
A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Bioenergetics
It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Island
The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's.
JEAN PAUL
attributed, Treasury of Thought