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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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

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

“Past tears are present strength” George MacDonald, Phantastes

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

“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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

“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

“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

“A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future, but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.” Honoré de Balzac, Letters of Two Brides

“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else.” Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men

“The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.” Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

“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

“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

“The letters I had just inscribed on it were not even dry yet and already they belonged to the past.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

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

“The more the world speeds up the more it seems necessary that we should learn to pick out of the past the things that we feel were important and beautiful then. One of these things was a quality of tranquillity in people, which you rarely meet today.” Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt

“He didn’t know what he was going to — but it had to be better than what he was leaving behind.” J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

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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 dream mind

Related authors

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

Related sources

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

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