Top 100 Past Things Quotes
#1. If you have value as an artist it's probably going to be in your capacity to let things inside you get past things that are placed there to keep you from telling the truth. The more you see things as clearly and coldly as you can, the more value you're going to have.
Tony Kushner
#3. All I trust is the past. Things that have ended can't betray me.
Novala Takemoto
#4. On the mountains of memory by the world's wellsprings, in all man's eyes, where the light of life of him is on all past things, death only dies.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
#5. People change as they get older ... grow wiser, make better decisions ... i am very old,Laurel. Anyone who lives as long as I have can't help but collect regrets along the way ... things they did in the past ... things they wish they'd done differently.
Kate Morton
#6. There's no future in stories ... Stories are things of the past, things for museums.
David Mitchell
#7. And there are certain moments in your life when something becomes clear, and other things in the past - things that your mind, unbeknownst to you, had earmarked because they didn't quite add up - suddenly all click into place, like small gears in a watch.
Bridget Asher
#8. It was late afternoon. This time tomorrow he would be somewhere on a good graveled road, driving his car past things that happened to people, quicker than their happening.
("Death of a Traveling Salesman")
Eudora Welty
#9. We ran hunched along a subterranean corridor, discarded animal bones underfoot, the ceiling brushing our heads, past things I tried not to see - a slumped figure in a corner, sleepers shivering on miserable mats of straw, a boy in rags lying on the ground with a beggar's pail bangled around one arm.
Ransom Riggs
#10. There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out to the feelings.
Adam Gopnik
#11. [ ... ] you're willing to look past things and to give people second chances. But the thing is, Rose, some people don't deserve them.
Rebecca Serle
#12. Posterity will say as usual: In the past things were better, the present is worse than the past.
Anton Chekhov
#13. I thank the Lord that, even though things were so wrong in my life here, I finally was brought to the realization of what all those struggles were about. There are some wonderful things from your painful past, things with a beauty you may not have realized at the time.
Ravi Zacharias
#14. Some people seem so different, some people feel so much more than other people, some people are able to push past things so much easier. And ... it's just fascinating to me.
Marnie Stern
#15. If you ask yourself 'What's the best thing that happened today?' It actually forces a certain kind of cheerful retrospection that pulls up from the recent past things to write about that you wouldn't otherwise think about.
Austin Kleon
#16. I saw my whole life in front of me, and I had to let go of past things that I was trying to hold on to that were dark in my life.
Lindsay Lohan
#17. There was no warning before the outbreaks began. One day, things were normal; the next, people who were supposedly dead were getting up and attacking anything that came into range. This was upsetting for everyone involved, except for the infected, who were past being upset about that sort of thing.
Mira Grant
#18. 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
#19. It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.
Tobias Wolff
#20. One left; things shifted in one's absence; one returned to something else. Time frustrated all. There was no sneaking past its rough guard, even to get to one's own yard of intimacies.
Gish Jen
#21. Fame is like a big eraser. It's strange, now that I'm famous. In my parents' opinion, all the shitty things - all the wreckage of my past - is erased. Now it's like I was never the kid who got arrested. Now I'm a wonderful son.
Bobcat Goldthwait
#22. The script's always important, but there are some things that have come out in the past year that, when we read them, everyone was like, "Oh my god, this is going to be the next best thing!" Then the movie falls completely flat on its face.
Douglas Booth
#23. If you look and listen for it, you'll see and hear synchronistic clues from the Universe that go past everyone else but have special meaning for you, guiding you to make the best of things. Look for synchronistic "winks" from the Universe.
Bill Harvey
#24. The reason I entered politics was a belief that the people of this country - having achieved so much that was good and noble in our past - had the potential to do amazing things in the future.
Michael Gove
#25. 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
#26. There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain.
Ayn Rand
#27. But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.
Aldous Huxley
#28. How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time, the past and the future, in which all things disappear.
Marcus Aurelius
#29. There's nothing easy about winning a game in the National Football League, let alone winning a championship, things that we've done in the past. However, that's in the past.
Rodney Harrison
#30. I recall feeling an almost delicious terror when one day I found myself alone in the midst of tall June grasses that grew high as my head. But here the secret working of self consciousness is almost too entangled with the things of the past for me to explain it.
Pierre Loti
#31. And as far as wishing goes, I save my wishes for things that can still come true. There's no point in wasting them on the past.
G.A. McKevett
#32. All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#33. When you're young, you wish for things in the future, but when you grow old ... you wish for things from the past to
Lorraine Heath
#34. I won't lie, I've had a lot of discouraging moments in the past years, moments I wasn't sure about things and doubted myself.
Shania Twain
#35. Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#36. It costs so much to promote something these days that almost always safety is the preferred option, reference back to things which have been successful in the past. Also, people are simply not given the time to develop and find themselves and their audience as we were.
Peter Hammill
#37. The past stood at my shoulder, naked and defenseless as all dead things, as though it were time itself that had been laid open by the fall of the mountain.
Gene Wolfe
#38. When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered ... the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls ... bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory
Marcel Proust
#39. It's in the act of having to do things that you don't want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.
Bell Hooks
#40. There are things that once done can't be undone, things that once said can't be unsaid.
Lisa Gardner
#41. The rich of this world will vanish like smoke, and no memory of their past pleasures will remain. But even in their lifetime they do not enjoy them without bitterness, weariness and fear, for the very things whence they derive their pleasures often carry with them the seeds of sorrow.
Thomas A Kempis
#42. Your life is a reflection of your past thoughts. That includes all the great things, and all the things you consider not so great ... Think thoughts of abundance and wealth, and do not allow any contradictory thoughts to take root.
Rhonda Byrne
#43. White had learned that going back in time was a way of fixing things; uncovering past traumas, revisiting them and defusing their power.
Helen Macdonald
#44. You gotta keep things moving. If leaving behind the past means you can have a better future, then, sure, why not?
Lisa Mangum
#45. For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.
Anna Funder
#46. We learn nothing of very much importance when it can be explained entirely in terms of past experience. If it were possible to understand all things in terms of what we know already, we could convey the sense of color to a blind man with nothing but sound, taste, touch, and smell.
Alan W. Watts
#47. I would have thought,"he went on,"that by now you would have gotten past not being able to trust anyone, Maryse."
"Some things you never forget," she said.
Cassandra Clare
#48. People have said things about me, and wrote and criticized me about things in the past, but it goes in one ear and out the other.
Floyd Mayweather Jr.
#49. I don't write diaries and things like that, but I have a fantastic memory. I call that like a magic carpet. I can really concentrate and travel back in the past I don't know how many years from now and evoke that space if I wanted.
Francoise Gilot
#50. Of this alone, even god is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been.
Agathon
#51. You are only happy in life if you forget the bad things and focus on the good things
Jeroen Saey
#52. One of the worst things we could do is start to act now as though the attack of 9/11 is a thing of the past and will never be repeated. That's just not true.
Dick Cheney
#53. While in the past we may have wanted loyal employees, today we need flexible people who are not possessive about "the way things are done around here." And
Spencer Johnson
#54. For me, the best things in life - meaningful work, meaningful relationships, interesting experiences, good food, sleep, music, ideas, sex, and other basic needs and pleasures - are not, past a certain point, materially improved upon by having a lot of money.
Ray Dalio
#55. Things that are done, it is needless to speak about; things that have had their course, it is needless to remonstrate about; things that are past, it is needless to blame.
Confucius
#56. The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ came to do three things. He came to have my past forgiven, you get a purpose for living and a home in Heaven.
Rick Warren
#57. what has happened is out of your and my control, we can't change that ever, but what we can do is forget. The worse things of past and accept your present with its purity and its real shine, remember my friend this is the only way you can live happily
Pritesh Bhosale
#58. Well, [bluntness in songwriting]'s a lot cheaper than therapy ... There's been a lot of things going on for the past 10 years that I just never really confronted, or used metaphors to do so. This time out I wanted to make sure that everyone knows what I'm talking about and where I'm coming from.
Brent Smith
#59. O thoughts of men accursed!
Past and to come seems best; things present, worst.
William Shakespeare
#60. I am not nostalgic about things. When you have a kind of improvement, I am not nostalgic about the past.
Pierre Boulez
#61. I'm not an expert in the sociological realities of all the pastors in the world, but I would say that there are some very, very positive things about the state of integrity in church leaders.
Henry Cloud
#62. The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. This present, this day, this very moment we inhabit--it all will be held accountable for the things it didn't know, didn't understand.
Laura Lippman
#63. I realized that there are just certain things in life that are private. I have things in my past - like everyone - that I'm not proud of.
Ken Osmond
#64. Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.
Angela Carter
#65. It's not what's happening to you now or what has happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it's your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you're going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny ...
Tony Robbins
#66. My dad? He died when I was 19, which is a bad time for your dad to die, because there's an awful lot of things you have to resolve with your parents past your teens if you've been a difficult teenager.
Robbie Coltrane
#67. Ice contains no future , just the past, sealed away. As if they're alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way- cleanly, clearly. That's the essence of ice, the role it plays.
Haruki Murakami
#68. We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesen't remind us what we did badly, it reminds us what we know we could do better.
Kathryn Schulz
#69. For the first time in a long time, he didn't think of the past. And of all the things he'd lost. He thought only of the present, and what he had. And how it was so much more than he deserved. And he prayed then that he would never, ever lose it.
Jennifer Donnelly
#70. One of the beautiful things about having kids is I had no idea how much it will make you look into yourself and who you are and what you believe in and what your past was like and all that kind of stuff. I think it's made me really look at life in a much more intense way.
Jamie Cullum
#71. Old ways of doing things cease to be effective, though they may have been very powerful in the past. There arises a very real danger that we will set ourselves in opposition to what God truly is doing now and aims to do in the future.
Dallas Willard
#72. Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my normal modes of travel. Miles weren't things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched.
Cheryl Strayed
#73. The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.
Jamaica Kincaid
#74. To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
James Baldwin
#75. Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.
Margaret Atwood
#76. When I rule the world," screamed the Bogey, "all antiques will be destroyed! Antiques will be things of the past!
Mark Gorton
#77. Most industrial designers do a bottle or a pen or a computer - things that go right past your eye. When you see a chair, it's almost like a person. It's this great big thing in front of you. It hits you more.
Charles Pollock
#78. Visiting old haunts is hard on memory. Things shrink, change, and disappear.
Shirley Temple
#80. The present is the merest flicker between the long long time past and the things that haven't yet happened but most assuredly will.
Estela Portillo Trambley
#81. But as an actor you do want to challenge yourself and step outside what you have done in the past and that what I like to do, I like to jump around and try different things and stretch myself.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead
#82. I never save things and I never take pictures. I wanna live in the moment. I don't wanna be focusing on the past.
Angelina Jolie
#83. Few things are more absurd than wise saws originally designed to inculcate or maintain the social needs of a society long past - when they are applied to today.
Idries Shah
#84. When that little clock on my wall says "Olaotan! Olaotan!! Olaotan!!! It's half past time to write", I only have three things at my disposal: A pen, A piece of paper, and a crowded mind.
Olaotan Fawehinmi
#85. The setting sun, and the music at the close, As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last, Writ in rememberance more than long things past.
William Shakespeare
#86. One of the hopeful things that I've discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it.
Julian Assange
#87. More are men's ends mark'd than their lives before:
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past
William Shakespeare
#88. He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.
Frank Herbert
#89. Things are what they are and there's no point dwelling in the past or wondering what could have been.
Emily Giffin
#90. And we do talk a lot about my past and my impression of things and how it relates to what we're doing now. The Brady Bunch, in its heyday, was really the genesis of when TV started to become the force that it is today.
Mike Lookinland
#91. I tell you the truth, so many people failed to do what they could have done because of the bitter things that happened in the past.
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#92. Creation is all space, all time - all things past, present, and future.
Matthew Fox
#93. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
L.P. Hartley
#94. can do without a lot of things, the only thing I can't do without is the past. [
Svetlana Alexievich
#95. Not everything in your past qualifies to be called HISTORY; only the things in the past that shaped your FUTURE
Fela Durotoye
#96. I always wrote about things that were important to me. I think our past success showed that it was also important for a lot of others.
Gavin Rossdale
#97. Keep off your thoughts from things that are past and done; for thinking of the past wakes regret and pain.
Arthur Waley
#98. There have to be more important things going on in the world than my past.
Charlie Sheen
#99. They spoke from a distant past when everyone read books and most people had hobbies, made things, played cards and chess, dressed up and played charades, sewed and painted and wrote letters and sent postcards.
Ruth Rendell
#100. The oncoming night was filled with the mystery of unknown places and of distance, of things that happened long ago and happenings yet to com
Elyne Mitchell
