Past Quotes

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.

Walter Benjamin

You are now at a crossroads. This is your opportunity to make the most important decision you will ever make. Forget your past. Who are you now? Who have you decided you really are now? Don't think about who you have been. Who are you now? Who have you decided to become? Make this decision consciously. Make it carefully. Make it powerfully.

Anthony Robbins

An expert is someone who knows a lot about the past.

Tom Hopkins

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The value of the beans for oil production, as well as for human food, has become recognized so quickly and so generally during the past year that the crop has acquired a commercial standing far in excess of its previous status.

David F. Houston

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

Lewis Mumford

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

Marcus Garvey

Things that are done, it is needless to speak about; things that are past it is needless to blame.

Confucius

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.

Hart Crane

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

Napoléon Bonaparte

Music is a fluid art form that picks up echoes of the past and weaves them into a new sound. The distinct sounds of the past merge together to create what we know today as gospel, western, folk, or jazz.

Ryan Lewis

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

Wendell Berry

My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the misery I've endured over the past twenty-five years

Paul Merton

One day at a time--this is enough. Do not look back and grieve over the past for it is gone; and do not be troubled about the future, for it has not yet come. Live in the present, and make it so beautiful it will be worth remembering

unknown

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

Sontag, Susan