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Past quotes

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“Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” George Orwell, 1984

“The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“The one charm of the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Are not there little chapters in everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?” William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

“What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time?” William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“what necessity is there to dwell on the Past, when the Present is so much surer—the Future so much brighter?” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“The laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the future.” Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“It's in vain . . . to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“He doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there’s the future. Sheer vertigo.” Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title” Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana, The Life of Reason

“When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once...” James Joyce, Ulysses

“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

“Gradually, he fell into that deep tranquil sleep which ease from recent suffering alone imparts; that calm and peaceful rest which it is pain to wake from. Who, if this were death, would be roused again to all the struggles and turmoils of life;...” Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“What's gone and what's past help should be past grief.” William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

“People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.” Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Don't think of what's past! . . . I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what to-morrow has in store?” Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles

“I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.” Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.” James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.” George Orwell, 1984

“Who controls the past . . . controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, 1984

“You have to know the past to understand the present.” Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.” Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Past tears are present strength” George MacDonald, Phantastes

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we...” Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union Address

“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.” James Joyce, Ulysses

“Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.” George Orwell, 1984

“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.” Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

“What's done can't be undone, but at least you can keep it from happening again.” Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Identity isn’t a prison you can never escape, but the way to redeem your past is not to run from it, but to try to understand it, and use it as a foundation to grow.” JAY-Z, Decoded

“I like men who have a future and women who have a past” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.” George Eliot, Middlemarch

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

“Past glories are poor feeding.” Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.” James Joyce, Ulysses

“To mourn a mischief that is past and gone is the next way to draw new mischief on.” William Shakespeare, Othello

“The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.” William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

“No reflection was to be allowed now: not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet—so deadly sad—that to read one line of it...” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.” John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.” Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History

“The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.” Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“The past was like a bad dream; the future was all happy holiday as I moved southwards week by week, easily, lazily, lingering as long as I dared, but always heeding the call!” Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“For you and I are past our dancing days.” William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

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

“I don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in the present.” Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“A person who doesn’t learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation.” Stephen King, 11/22/63

“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

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Related topics

time future present history memory life death control regret happiness women learning books sadness living moving on ideals truth mind dream

Related authors

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1)
Charlotte Brontë (2)
William Shakespeare (7)
James Joyce (4)
George Orwell (4)
Oscar Wilde (4)
Chuck Palahniuk (3)
Charles Dickens (2)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2)
Haruki Murakami (2)
Stephen Hawking (2)
George Eliot (2)
G. K. Chesterton (2)
Kenneth Grahame (2)
Cormac McCarthy (2)
Abraham Lincoln (1)
Joseph Conrad (1)
George MacDonald (1)
Anne Frank (1)
Jane Austen (1)

Related sources

Ulysses (3)
State of the Union Address (1)
1984 (4)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (3)
What's Wrong with the World (2)
Jane Eyre (2)
A Brief History of Time (2)
The Tempest (2)
The Great Gatsby (2)
The Wind in the Willows (2)
A Woman of No Importance (1)
Macbeth (1)
Heart of Darkness (1)
Romeo and Juliet (1)
Long Walk to Freedom (1)
The Alchemist (1)
Pensées (1)
David Copperfield (1)
Pride and Prejudice (1)
Kafka on the Shore (1)

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