quotations about the past
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
When we look back on our past there is often an element of fiction that enters the picture. The colours seem brighter or darker, the people more delightful or cruel, events are collapsed, mixed and reconfigured. Nevertheless our visions seem utterly convincing, at least to ourselves.
LAETITIA WILSON
"Questions at the heart of identity", The West Australian, April 1, 2016
The past is essentially unknowable: we remake it in our image. Things do not speak for themselves -- we must make them speak.
PAUL MCAULEY
interview, Infinity Plus
Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
JANE AUSTEN
Pride and Prejudice
While no one can change events that occurred in the past, everyone can change attitudes and beliefs about them.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic
If it is justifiable, and even useful and necessary, to turn back to study our past, it is only in order to establish what we have been and what we must no longer be, what we have believed and thought and what we must no longer believe or think, what we have done and what we must do nevermore.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
You can't rewrite the past, but you can revise it by looking at it differently.
BARBARA DEANE
Getting Ready for a Great Retirement
It was a dream of perfect bliss
Too beautiful to last;
I seemed to welcome back again
The bright days of the past.
I was a boy--my mimic ship
Sail'd down the village stream,
And I was gay and innocent--
But, ah! it was a dream.
THOMAS HAYNES BAYLY
It Was a Dream
Since you can't rewrite the past you had better learn to live with it.
FAY WELDON
Godless in Eden: A Book of Essays
Everyone knows ... that we have fallen far from the brave days of the past.
GENE WOLFE
The Claw of the Conciliator
We all live on the past, and through the past are destroyed.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The future is there ... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Pattern Recognition
When then time is passing, it may be perceived and measured; but when it is past, it cannot, because it is not.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Hyperion
The past is gone. It is only an illusion that we can get it back.
DOUG WAGNER
"The Future Is Coming and There Is No Going Back to the Past", The Good Men Project, March 16, 2016
A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Bioenergetics
It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Island
The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's.
JEAN PAUL
attributed, Treasury of Thought