Top 100 Past Present Sayings
#1. Nothing is going to remain the way it is. Let us, in the present, study the past, so as to invent the future.
Augusto Boal
#2. Let's forgive the past and who we were then. Let's embrace the present and who we're capable of becoming. Let's surrender the future and watch miracles unfold.
Marianne Williamson
#4. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.
Robert Kennedy
#5. The past is kind enough to give you lessons. The present is kind enough to give you opportunities. The future is kind enough to give you both.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#6. If today shows no results, that doesn't mean the past wasn't working or the present isn't working. It just means we see only part of the picture. Faith believes God is working in every part of the process.
Deb Brammer
#7. Even in high school I was very interested in history - why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.
George Lucas
#8. Feeling the movement of movements is wandering to the past or future. Living in the movements of movement is being in the present.
B.K.S. Iyengar
#9. The past, the present and the future - none of those are set. We know that now. They change as we change.
Aliya Whiteley
#10. The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.
Jon Meacham
#11. Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?
Thomas Mann
#12. The Present Is Not The Past And It Is Not The Future. The Present Is The Present Moment! The Present Is Right Now!
Spencer Johnson
#13. History is the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instructor of the present, and monitor to the future.
Miguel De Cervantes
#14. You can tell a person's past, present and future by listening to the words they use.
Robert Kiyosaki
#15. Today, nobody cares about European culture. We have a tradition, a vision, a culture of the past, we have legacy, but we don't have a present culture and we don't have a future.
Frederic Martel?
#16. Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs for ever to the past.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#17. When we place our faith in Christ, God becomes our Father, we become his children, other believers become our brothers and sisters, and the church becomes our spiritual family. The family of God includes all believers in the past, the present, and the future.
Rick Warren
#18. When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.
Michel Houellebecq
#19. I wish I had a talking book that told me how to act and look, a talking book that contained keys to past and present memories
Lou Reed
#20. The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.
Alfred North Whitehead
#21. When we are motivated by compassion and wisdom, the results of our actions benefit everyone, not just our individual selves or some immediate convenience. When we are able to recognize and forgive ignorant actions of the past, we gain strength to constructively solve the problems of the present.
Dalai Lama XIV
#22. That had been the trouble with him and Betsy: what with his brooding about the past and worrying about the future, there had never been any present at all.
Sloan Wilson
#23. An unresolved past erodes beauty in the present.
Romany Malco
#24. A politics of vengeance is not politics. Revenge is a recklessness towards the future in a vain attempt to make the present abolish a suffering which is already past.
Bernard Crick
#25. You've got nothing to lose. Many people don't allow themselves to love, precisely because of that, because there are a lot of things at risk, a lot of future and a lot of past. In your case, there is only the present.
Paulo Coelho
#26. A daughter is the happy memories of the past, the joyful moments of the present, and the hope and promise of the future.
Bruce Barton
#27. The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.
Paul Fussell
#28. History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations.
M. King Hubbert
#29. I think there's value in experience and observations that link past to present.
Bill Kurtis
#30. I had feelings: passive as I lived, little as I spoke, cold as I looked, when I thought of past days, I could feel. About the present, it was better to be stoical; about the future - such a future as mine - to be dead.
Charlotte Bronte
#31. A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.
Robert A. Heinlein
#32. Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.
Adam Johnson
#33. Live for the present, as the past has gone and the future as yet to arrive.
LadyTiara
#34. The philosophical study of nature endeavors, in the the vicissitudes of phenomena, to connect the present with the past.
Alexander Von Humboldt
#35. Not only can no one predict the future, we don't understand the present - and there isn't even any certainty about the past.
Harry Browne
#36. The past defines us as much as the present. By never knowing my past, I was never sure of who I was. Because mine was missing, I never felt whole.
Arlene J. Chai
#37. Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.
W.G. Sebald
#38. He who has seen the present has seen everything, that which happened in the most distant past and that which will happen in the future.
Marcus Aurelius
#39. Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you can't let go of the past.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#40. Your desire or beliefs will literally be reaching back into time, teaching the nerves new tricks. Definite reorganizations in that past will occur in your present, allowing you to behave in entirely new fashions. Learned behavior therefore alters not only present and future but also past conduct.
Jane Roberts
#41. 'Movement is life;' and it is well to be able to forget the past, and kill the present by continual change.
Jules Verne
#42. Always take responsibility for your past. It is your only collateral in life. Unless you despise yourself now, you cannot despise yourself then. Everything you did is a part of the process that brought you here. All your past is as alive and real as your so-called 'present.'
Janet Morris
#43. My idea in terms of managing a narrative, or in thinking in my creative life, is that you could easily argue that the past, the present and the future all occur simultaneously, and if you can postulate that, then you're not strictly bound to a linear narrative.
Tommy Lee Jones
#44. When western books are set in the present, critics seldom call them westerns: the national myth allows the West only a past.
Gerald W. Haslam
#45. There is only now. And look! How rich we are in it.
Vanna Bonta
#46. The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past was troubling. I longed for a future too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think, and to SPEAK.
Frederick Douglass
#47. The circle is a reminder that each moment is not just the present, but is inclusive of our gratitude to the past and our responsibility to the future.
Kazuaki Tanahashi
#48. There was only present, and it was infinite. The past and the future were just blinders we wore so that infinity wouldn't drive us mad.
Laini Taylor
#49. I always liked it when people go back in time to discover things about themselves, like with 'A Christmas Carol' and you're getting a tour of your life by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.
John Cusack
#50. Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.
James Russell Lowell
#51. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.
Frederick Buechner
#52. You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.
Robert Harris
#53. Live the present intensely and fully, do not let the past be a burden, and let the future be an incentive. Each person forges his or her own destiny.
Carlos Slim
#54. The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.
John F. Kennedy
#55. Most of what brings me solace and peace are nothing more than ghosts of my past, yet I hold tightly to keep them with me in the present for fear that without them, I just might disappear too.
E.K. Blair
#56. Perhaps that's why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.
Kristin Hannah
#57. The feeling or emotion of happiness or joy is always momentary, but it's only your imaginations, that extend your momentary happiness, for some more time.
Roshan Sharma
#59. Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Susan Sontag
#60. History is about the untold story, and writing historical fiction is a wonderful way to present the past in a compelling and entertaining way.
Paul W. Feenstra
#61. Embrace and love all of yourself - past, present, and future. Forgive yourself quickly and as often as necessary. Encourage yourself. Tell yourself good things about yourself.
Melody Beattie
#62. God's call on our lives is often surprising and usually is based on God's ability to see how our various elements in the past might fit together to accomplish God's purposes in the present.
Adam Hamilton
#63. Worse, you all present tense and have to deal with sudden past tense all around you. It's like realizing somebody rob you a year late.
Marlon James
#64. Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act
act in the living Present! Heart within and God overhead.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#65. The present time of believers is no longer determined by the past. It takes its definition from the future.
Jurgen Moltmann
#66. Knowledge of the past and an optimistic view of the present give you great opportunities.
Buzz Aldrin
#67. The new is a guest in the house of the old.
Marty Rubin
#68. Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.
Paul Fussell
#69. Losers live in the past. Winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present toward the future.
Denis Waitley
#70. You and I move through time like a flame on a string. The ashes behind are the past, consumed, unreachable. The string ahead is the future. But the only moment we inhabit, the only moment where we can act, is the present, the point where the flame burns, the point where time touches eternity.
Brandon Mull
#71. A life well-lived in the present is all but impossible when you are tethered to your past.
Tucker Elliot
#72. Not only have past processes made us what we are-"modern" or "postmodern" selves, rather than "medieval" or "early modern" selves-but by explaining them we both account for and implicitly justify present realities.
Brad S. Gregory
#73. Past and present commingle:
Eternity in the single blink of an eye!
Lu Chi
#74. Remembering what you want about the past, even if it's not entirely true, keeps you from giving up on the present.
Susan Meissner
#75. There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.
Paula Fox
#76. If there were a clear prospect that such evils were part of a barbarian past, then at least we might find a small crumb of comfort. No such prospect exists: no scientific analysis can even remotely answer or account for past and present horrors of human behaviour.
Simon Conway Morris
#77. New York has never learnt the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs.
Michel De Certeau
#78. Divination is the quest to understand more about the past, present, and future. In other words, Tarot readings are an attempt to understand ourselves better and discover how we might live better in the future.
Theresa Cheung
#79. The past would haunt when the present let up, and always, always the future would loom with its certainty of tragedy and pain.
Erika Robuck
#80. Because freedom, it turned out, wasn't like a new shoe: you didn't need to break it in. It felt comfortable the first time you tried it on. It wasn't the present that pinched, it was the past.
Dale Peck
#81. Time was just a hangover from the past with no present meaning
Norman Maclean
#82. It seems to me ... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions ... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
Gustave Flaubert
#83. The past is a closed door, the present is an open one, and the future is an approaching one.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#84. The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.
Honore De Balzac
#85. Symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present.
Eamon Duffy
#86. One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.
Robert Harris
#87. I can face anything, except the future, and certain parts of the past and present.
Ashleigh Brilliant
#88. A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory
John Steinbeck
#89. He filled a shelf with a small army of books and read and read; but none of it made sense.. They were all subject to various cramping limitations: those of the past were outdated, and those of the present were obsessed with the past.
Alexander Pushkin
#90. The young should not think of themselves as immature and the elderly need not view themselves as feeble. Our minds control our bodies. Have no age, transcend both past and future, and enter into naka-ima - the eternal present.
H.E. Davey
#91. A great source of calamity lies in regret and anticipation; therefore a person is wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or future.
Oliver Goldsmith
#92. Life is the past, the present and the perhaps.
Bette Davis
#93. This is life. You know the philosphers? The Present never stops. There's only the Present. You cheat life if you live in the Past.
Scott Turow
#94. Life is not always about a past filled with mysteries or a future filled with endless dark possibilities ... it is also about a present filled with timeless distractions.
Con Template
#95. Even if you time travel your past, it can't be changed, likewise you can't possibly change your future, it is always the present which matters.
Pushpa Rana
#96. The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.
Guy De Maupassant
#97. My past, O Lord, to Your mercy; my present, to Your love; my future to Your providence.
Padre Pio
#98. Let your strength from the past
provide proof of your abilities to ...
conquer the difficulties of the present.
John-Talmage Mathis
#99. The arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future, the arms of love gather you together.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#100. Blake, your past is my past, your present is my present, and your future is my future. I bear the weight of everything that happens in your life. How can you not see that?
Claire Contreras