Past Quotes

Our past may explain why we're suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.

Living in the past is a dull and lonely business looking back strains the neck muscles causes you to bump into people not going your way.

I had to start new, my ego told me that if past ever wanted me, I won't be calling it by that name.

Fortunate are the people whose roots are deep.

Every thing has changed but my mind never.

Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance.

Surely time past is gone by like a shadow.

As the future ripens in the past,so the past rots in the future --a terrible festival of dead leaves.

If there is anything certain in life, it is this. Time doesn't always heal. Not really. I know they say it does, but that is not true. What time does is to trick you into believing that you have healed, that the hurt of a great loss has lessened. But a single word, a note of a song, a fragrance, a knife point of dawn light across an empty room, any one of these things will take you back to that one moment you have never truly forgotten. These small things are the agents of memory. They are the sharp needle points piercing the living fabric of your life.Life, my children, isn't linear where the heart is concerned. It is filled with invisible threads that reach out from your past and into your future. These threads connect every second we have lived and breathed. As your own lives move forward and as the decades pass, the more of these threads are cast. Your task is to weave them into a tapestry, one that tells the story of the time we shared.

The closer you get to your past the sooner you realize it was never present

Why ruin the present by talking about the past?

I had my chance.' He said it, retiring from a lifetime of wanting. 'I had my chance, and sometimes in life, there are no second chances. You look at what you have, not what you miss, and you move forward.

Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise?

No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.

I want something that is nothing like the past.

But you must stop playing among his ghosts -- it's stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He's trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It's not nice, and it's not fair.

I rest my head on his shoulder, feeling his heart beating against me. I wish I could gather time around us, slowing the minutes, making them last a lifetime.“I was born on the island kingdom of Ghedda,” I whisper. This is a story I never told even to you, Habiba. I tell it now only because I cannot bear to leave him without the truth, knowing only half of me. I raise my head and meet his eyes. “That was more than four thousand years ago. I was the eldest daughter of a wise and generous king.”Aladdin stares at me, his eyes soft and curious, encouraging me to go on.“When I was seventeen, I became queen of Ghedda. In those days, the jinn were greater in number, and the Shaitan held greater sway over the realms of men. He demanded we offer him twenty maidens and twenty warriors in sacrifice, in return for fair seas and lucrative trade. I was young and proud and desired, above all else, to be a fair ruler. I would not bow to his wishes, so he shook our island until it began to fall into the sea.”I shudder, and Aladdin draws me closer.“I climbed to the alomb at the top of the Mountain of Tongues, and there offered myself to the Shaitan, if he would only save my city from the sea.” My voice falls to a whisper, little more than a ripple on the water. “So he took me and made me jinn and put me in the lamp. And then he caused the Mountain of Tongues to erupt, and Ghedda was lost to fire. For he had sworn only to save my people from the sea, not from flame.

The past was a minefield about which few maps seemed to agree. And why should that surprise me? It's a big place.p. 30

Wilhelm’s smile reminded Harry of his father’s sad, resigned smile, the smile of a man looking backwards because that’s where the things that made him smile were.

If you are happy with your present time, you will look at your past with happy eyes even if you have had a sad past!

The past gives you no justice. Sentences are passed. But that doesn't mean you get justice. You can stand there forever and rail and say, 'Someone has to pay. I want what was taken from me.' But you're just going to get silence coming back at you. The past doesn't pay. We pay. And we're all free to decide when we've had enough.

Your past is a place for reference, not residence.

In many cases, people hold on so tightly to their past pains to avoid letting go of the “excuses” and the fear of having to be accountable for their life.

I set my face toward the sun again, and I think about my old life—the one I feel as though I’ve abandoned somehow. It hurts to think of it that way. And even though I know it wasn’t perfect, I look back now, and all I see is perfection. Every soft whisper, every spoken word, every gentle touch—it’s all perfect. Time won’t let me see it otherwise. They’re all just perfect memories—perfect, untouchable moments that came and went so softly that they almost feel as if they were always just a dream.

I wanted the past to go away, I wantedto leave it, like another country; I wantedmy life to close, and openlike a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the songwhere it fallsdown over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;I wantedto hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,whoever I was, I wasalivefor a little while.

The past cannot hurt you. It’s all in your head.

Recognizing what we have done in the past is a recognition of ourselves. By conducting a dialogue with our past we are searching how to go forward.

Looking back at the past is like deleting what you have created in the present.

Forgive those who hurt you yesterday.Reward those who help you today.Remember those who help you tomorrow.

Don’t let the poison of the past spoil a fruitful future.

Focus on The Present. Only The Present

No one else knows exactly what the future holds for you, no one else knows what obstacles you've overcome to be where you are, so don't expect others to feel as passionate about your dreams as you do.

Remembering to forget the past allows you freedom from a past that holds back your Christian growth.

If you're going to make the past your present, be prepared for a lifetime of dust ...

The skeletons of the past must not hold back the dream of a new life, even though fear and regret, guilt and remorse may unsettle us during the effort to give our future a new home. (“Into a new life”)

A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

Don't let the blights of the past hold you back from the bliss of the future

From one moment to another memory steps back to rediscover the past

Procrastination is a way of living in the past instead of the present moment.

Yes, memories do haunt. Memories of a happy past, in the expectation of a bleak future, in a sad present. - Anita

How to win in life:1 work hard 2 complain less 3 listen more 4 try, learn, grow5 don't let people tell you it cant be done6 make no excuses

To live a more balanced life, glance at the past, live in the present, and focus on the future.

Old times never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year and that's better.

But she knew that no matter what beauty lay behind, it must remain there. No one could go forward with a load of aching memories.

You are done with the past, but the past isn't done with you.

Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses.

The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.

Because it happened in the past , doesn't mean it forgotten ...!!

I've learned to appreciate what I've got. I'm not going to waste an ounce of energy on sorting through the past or with worrying about the future. Life's too short for that.

When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.

Let go of the past, even if it offers you Heaven; embrace the future, even if it offers you Hell.

I didn't know that I've completely left them all in the past. There's a part of me, wishing and hoping, that she would come back for me, and we would start a new life together, but she didn't.

And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.

Don't waste our children's future on man's past.

Reach into the past and remember the reasons you fell in love. Hold on to that, son, and cherish it. Then you must start moving forward again.

Everything would turn out exactly the same, and I would return here for a second time, and then, if I was fool enough, a third time, waiting, as now, for my other to touch the canvas. And it would be progressively worse, because though I would know slightly more each time, I would still be powerless to change my fate. Perhaps I would be unaware of the previous decision, yet choose again to come back. Or worse, I would become aware that I was inadvertently repeating the same mistake for a horrific split second just after I made the decision. Infinity was terrifying. Its abyss makes my skin crawl.

I am the collector of the past.

What you do now will be in the past right after you do it.

The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask tobe imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.