Top 100 Out Of The Past Quotes
#1. The question I am most often asked is how do I find my ideas? The answer is I don't. Ideas find me. A character in history will suddenly step right out of the past and demand a book. Generally, people don't bother to speak to me unless there's a good chance that I'll take them on.
Jean Fritz
#2. I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make a future.
Robert Penn Warren
#3. The Past
the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf
the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?
Walt Whitman
#4. There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#5. We're all struggling to get out of the past. We see something that reminds us of something, and then we bring our baggage into the present. Then we project it onto people constantly.
Sophie B. Hawkins
#6. To be spontaneous means not to act out of the past, because out of the past is all cunningness, cleverness, calculation, arithmetic.
Rajneesh
#7. Zen lives in the present. The Whole teaching is: how to be in the present; how to get out of the past which is no more and how not to get involved in the future which is not yet, and just to be rooted, centered, in that which is.
Rajneesh
#8. Stay out of the past. There's nothing there but would've beens, could've beens, and should've beens that will keep you from moving forward.
Julia Mills
#9. Out of the past come the standards for judging the present; standards in turn to be shaped by the practice of present-day dramatists into broader standards for the next generation.
George Pierce Baker
#11. The gateways to wisdom and learning are always open, and more and more I am choosing to walk through them. Barriers, blocks, obstacles, and problems are personal teachers giving me the opportunity to move out of the past and into the Totality of Possibilities.
Louise L. Hay
#12. If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end,
The future might stop emerging out of the past,
Out of what is full of us; yet the search
And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
Wallace Stevens
#13. Mind concentrates: it acts out of the past. Meditation acts in the present, out of the present.
Rajneesh
#14. It was not possible to hold on to ashes. In my dreams I had always walked out of the past, and it shut behind me, a door I couldn't unlock. Now I intended to do the same in my waking life.
Alice Hoffman
#15. Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back.
Wendell Phillips
#16. There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as though a chink in the dark: light out of the past. It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice agin, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#17. People spend too much time finding other people to blame, too much energy finding excuses for not being what they are capable of being, and not enough energy putting themselves on the line, growing out of the past, and getting on with their lives.
J. Michael Straczynski
#18. If the mind wants to comprehend reality, it will have to come out of the past and the future. But coming out of the past and the future, it is no longer the mind at all. Hence the insistence of all the great masters of the world that the door to reality is no-mind.
Rajneesh
#19. No wonder I want to be Robert Mitchum: big, strong, super-cool, with those Freon eyes of his. That's who I was pretending to be a minute ago - Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. - Ben
Ron Koertge
#20. The tentacles of today reach out like an octopus to swallow yesterday.
Gladys Taber
#21. Death was hard, I got that, but it was only hard for those you left behind. Life was what was really difficult. Everyone here no longer had to suffer, be in pain, relive past mistakes. They were sleeping on, unaware of the problems around them. Death seemed like the easy way out. Life was harder.
Bailey Ardisone
#22. The future is all possibilities, but the past is set in stone. All those ghosts of ourselves, our youth, still alive inside us, but out of our reach forever. We meet them when we close our eyes, when we let our memories come alive. But that's all they are. Memories. No more real than a dream.
Wendy Mass
#23. TV is all about hair. And then skin. And then clothing. And then it's about your voice. And finally the report, what you're actually saying. And 99 times out of 100, it never gets past the hair.
Douglas Coupland
#24. The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,
mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small- clothes, out of date.
Henry David Thoreau
#25. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally
Charles Dickens
#26. People are powerfully moved by imagination, belief, and knowledge. They can consider the past and future. They can make changes in their behavior out of reason in a way that animals can't do.
Gretchen Rubin
#27. As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by 'survival of the fittest.'
Bill Cosby
#28. Caught Summer is always an imagined time. Time gave it, yes, but time out of any mind. There must be prime In the heart to beget that season, to reach past rain and find Riding the palest days Its perfect blaze.
Richard Wilbur
#29. Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.
Philip Zaleski
#30. Republicans working in leadership and the trenches are largely old, white, male, out-of-touch, out of ideas, technology averse, and living in the past.
Mark McKinnon
#31. Alex grinned and then walked past him, murmuring, "I applaud you for your courage."
"Courage?" he asked with confusion.
"Hmm." She headed for the door to the hall, swinging her purse gaily as she went. "Many men find it difficult to come out of the closet.
Lynsay Sands
#32. The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.
Anton Chekhov
#33. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
Ernest Hemingway,
#34. And for the past 10 years I've been in a real commercial setting where people are all about numbers, they're all about that bottom line. So it's nice to step out of that and hang out with a bunch of people who play music just because they love it, as you can imagine.
Lee Ann Womack
#35. 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
#36. It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.
Clay Shirky
#37. Make a pact with yourself today to not be defined by your past. Sometimes the greatest thing to come out of all your hard work isn't what you get for it, but what you become for it. Shake things up today! Be You ... Be Free ... Share.
Steve Maraboli
#38. As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply: 'Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me.
Kurt Vonnegut
#39. I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!
Charles Dickens
#40. But no matter what I did, Elentiya, I want you to know that in the darkness of the past ten years, you were one of the bright lights for me. Do not let that light go out
Sarah J. Maas
#41. Bismarck's genius, as well as his great flaw, was the same as that of another outstanding nineteenth-century politician of the German-speaking world, Prince Clemens Metternich. Both men were artificers, able to hold off the future by building a fragile present out of pieces of the past.
Robert D. Kaplan
#42. There was a certain liberation in talking to a man who didn't have a full grasp of English. She could tell him anything and half of it would fly right past him, especially if the words came tumbling out fast enough
Anne Tyler
#43. Revolutions as often take place because the old regime simply collapse out of economic inefficiency and bureaucratic rigidity rather than for the reasons given out by their successors taking too much credit, however heroic their actions at the time of crisis (but so often in the past hopeless).
Bernard Crick
#44. For those filled with regret, perhaps the most needful exercise of proactivity is to realize that past mistakes are also out there in the Circle of Concern. We can't recall them, we can't undo them, we can't control the consequences that came as a result.
Stephen R. Covey
#45. It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistakes, even absurd beliefs, so we may well fail in a decent respect for them, and forget that historians of the future will point out that we too lived by myths.
Herbert J. Muller
#46. We are as gods on our little rock in the vast bleak cosmos and it's way past time we started getting good at that instead of just posing on Olympus and photoshopping our zits out. The future is more than an Instagram filter.
Warren Ellis
#47. I've learned that history is the autobiography of the historian, that ignoring the past is the act of a fool, and that loyalty does not mean falling into line, but stepping out of it for the people you love.
Annie Barrows
#48. Pain of the past never goes away, you just find a way to deal with it. And in the future ... all the promise it holds ... that's what keeps you moving forward, and out of the darkness.
Samantha Towle
#49. Yanked out of the present, Adam discovered the richness of the past in people's stories.
Randy Alcorn
#50. Soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife. Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life. But as we go our sordid sep'rate ways, We shall ne'er forget thee, thou golden college days. Hearts full of youth, Hearts full of truth, Six parts gin to one part vermouth.
Tom Lehrer
#51. I feel like I'm part of a generation of people who are stuck in the past and are really self-absorbed. I mean, we're actually taking pictures of ourselves and posting them on Facebook, and keeping in touch with people that should have been out of our lives 15 years ago.
Diablo Cody
#52. But memories were fragile and not to be trusted. They were a weight that Faolin did not need to carry with him when he set out that morning. Things of the past, like the fragile boy he had been, had no place on a man's journey towards his future.
Madeline Claire Franklin
#53. Shock equals discovery, and if I narrated my past, you'd be pretty grossed out too, I bet - same as if you narrated yours. Aren't we all composed of our past mistakes? Isn't that part of emerging into an adult awareness of the world?
D.T. Max
#54. Words matter, especially words defining complicated political arrangements, because they shape perceptions of the events of the past, attitudes toward policies being carried out in the present, and expectations about desirable directions for the future.
Michael Mandelbaum
#55. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.
Robert Penn Warren
#56. The same things we've done the past couple of seasons. We've worked on the engine and clutch. We'll try and pick up the performance and consistency of the car and go back out there.
Larry Dixon
#57. I want to heal him with each and every one of our kisses. With every time we make love. Make him see that despite the past, the future holds mysteries that we can explore hand in hand. His melodious voice pulls me out of these thoughts.
L. H. Cosway
#58. The enchanted world arising out of the dim mists of the past, into which he just stepped, quivered-and disappeared.
Ivan Turgenev
#59. There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#60. It struck me that my backside was my best asset and that keeping it hidden would be like Oedipus pulling out his eyes so that he couldn't see the errors of the past.
Chloe Thurlow
#61. If soldiering did not interest him, the soldiers themselves were another matter. He loved to sit with the men and draw out their first-hand stories of past campaigns.
Geraldine Brooks
#62. You know it already that each one of us is the effect of the infinite past; the child is ushered into the world not as something flashing from the hands of nature, as poets delight so much to depict, but he has the burden of an infinite past; for good or evil he comes to work out his own past deeds
Swami Vivekananda
#63. For the past three years, the Senate intelligence committee has avoided carrying out its oversight of our nation's intelligence programs whenever the White House becomes uncomfortable with the questions being asked. The very independence of this committee is called into question.
Jay Rockefeller
#64. With another curse, I'm out of the truck, slamming the door to piss Pigpen off. He follows as I go up the stairs, then brushes past me when I pause. He grins at me over his shoulder before opening the screen door.
Katie McGarry
#65. Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language.
Cynthia Ozick
#66. Isn't it weird that everything that's coming out of my mouth is going directly into the past?
Rebekah Crane
#67. If I learned anything these past few months, it's that life sucks, Daniel. It sucks. It's mean, it's vicious, and it's unapologetic. It's dark and cruel. But then, sometimes, it's so beautiful that it knocks all of that darkness out of your system with the light.
Brittainy C. Cherry
#68. The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us.
Eugene O'Neill
#69. All the creations of God stretch out infinitely. All times, past, present and future for all beings, worlds unimagined
Frederick Lenz
#70. When man is born, the human race as well as the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open. There is certainty only about the past - and about the future only as far as that it is death.
Erich Fromm
#71. In the last couple of years I've been facing down a lot of the demons of the past and trying to find out, who I am, It's something I think I'll be doing for the rest of my life.
David Coverdale
#72. Knowledge comes from the past, so it's safe. It is also out of date. It's the opposite of originality ... Experience is the opposite of being creative.
Paul Arden
#73. Harry could still hear the distant bangs of escaped firecrackers when he and Ron went up to bed an hour later, and as he got undressed a sparkler floated past the tower, still resolutely spelling out the word
J.K. Rowling
#74. To move out of the patterns of our past and create the future we want we must pass through the gateway of the present
David Schlussel
#75. Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps ... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.
Leon Trotsky
#76. because he was the man he was, one strong thing came out of the confusion: love. 'Love' had caused him trouble in the recent past, but he went with it anyway, stubbornly holding to the idea that 'love' - whenever and wherever it touched down - was always right.
Andre Alexis
#77. In the past, as now, [Hollywood] was a stamping ground for tastelessness, violence, and hyperbole, but once upon a time it turned out a product which sweetened the flavor of life all over the world.
Anita Loos
#78. Miriam felt astonished at herself. It was a new thing for her to step out so independently. Somehow, in the past month a tough little root of determination had been growing in her. Whether it was strong enough to support the desperate plan she had undertaken she would soon find out.
Elizabeth George Speare
#79. As we walked past a quad bike chained to a farm gate, he remarked "It's such a pity how times have changed. You can't leave a piece of machinery out on the road any more." He seemed to have forgotten that he had just been describing a time when you couldn't leave you cattle out.
Rory Stewart
#80. Most of the stats say that 90% of people who buy a book or check one out of a library would never get past the first chapter. To me, the title better say everything there is to say about the book.
Larry Winget
#81. If you trace effect back to cause and that cause back to another cause and so on, back through the long dim corridors of the past until you come to the primordial atom out of which all things were made, you will find the One who made them - you'll find God.
A.W. Tozer
#82. I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.
Peter Carey
#83. God's forgiveness is not just a casual statement; it is the complete blotting out of all dirt and degradation of our past, present, and future.
Billy Graham
#84. Thus, human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of the kind that could not have happened in the past ... Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.
Roger Revelle
#85. I think it's important to cross train. Surfing is a good cross training sport for your shoulders. I don't think I know of any other football player who does it, who can go and paddle out past the sets.
Troy Polamalu
#86. Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.
Roberto Bolano
#87. My friend, be not like him who sits by his fireside and watches the fire go out, then blows vainly upon the dead ashes. Do not give up hope or yield to despair because of that which is past, for to bewail the irretrievable is the worst of human frailties.
Khalil Gibran
#88. He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#89. Sorcha curtseyed to Ronan and stalked past him.
Smiling the men cast glances her way, but didn't dare say a word.
Alban shook his head. "She is a hell cat, Ronan. Marry her and put us all out of our misery.
Terry Spear
#90. They have tried to squeeze us out, to stamp us into the past. But we are still here.
And there are more of us everyday.
Lauren Oliver
#91. These past couple of years have been about learning to not sabotage myself in a subtler way - for instance, even just by putting moisturiser on when I get out of the shower. Learning to honour myself and believing that I'm worth taking care of.
Maggie Gyllenhaal
#92. I've lived out my melancholy youth. I don't give a fuck anymore what's behind me, or what's ahead of me. I'm healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today!
Henry Miller
#93. It is strange how interiors reflect their dark turbulent past, how in their stillness bygone history tries to be reenacted, how the same situations repeat themselves with infinite variations, turned upside down and inside out by fruitless dialectic of wallpapers and hangings.
Bruno Schulz
#94. Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
H.L. Mencken
#95. I just don't want to live in the past. I'm really disappointed by so many people of my generation who - in order to promote their new work, they have to constantly lean on their past. I don't want to be that type of artist ... I see a lot of people out here doing really marginal music.
Billy Corgan
#96. How does anyone ever know anything - the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation.
Ben Fountain
#97. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.
Elif Shafak
#98. You don't go that far past the borders of Crazytown and come waltzing out unscathed.
Mira Grant
#99. I became a vegetarian out of concern for animals, but I wasn't a vegetarian long before I realized there's something to that. I don't think I would have worked for the past five years probably were it not for my vegetarian diet.
Bob Barker
#100. And I know I won't get the story out of Zu, not the full one, anyway. That's okay. We're allowed to have our secrets. Starting now, I'm leaving the past alone in the past.
Alexandra Bracken
