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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

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

“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

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

“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 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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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

“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

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

“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

“And by that destiny to perform an act Whereof what's past is prologue, what to come In yours and my discharge.” William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“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

“Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

“I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.” George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.” Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“Animals arrived, liked the look of the place, took up their quarters, settled down, spread, and flourished. They didn't bother themselves about the past—they never do; they're too busy.” Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.” Oscar Wilde, Intentions

“I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past.” G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

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

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

“The increase of disorder or entropy with time is one example of what is called an arrow of time, something that distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.” Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

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

“Things without all remedy should be without regard: what's done is done.” William Shakespeare, Macbeth

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Related topics

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

Related authors

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1)
William Shakespeare (7)
Oscar Wilde (5)
James Joyce (4)
George Orwell (4)
Chuck Palahniuk (3)
Charles Dickens (2)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2)
Haruki Murakami (2)
George Eliot (2)
Stephen Hawking (2)
G. K. Chesterton (2)
Cormac McCarthy (2)
Kenneth Grahame (2)
Charlotte Brontë (2)
Abraham Lincoln (1)
Anne Frank (1)
Jane Austen (1)
George MacDonald (1)
Joseph Conrad (1)

Related sources

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

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