Top 100 Quotes About Our Past
#1. In order to live the life we desire, and set the intention for greater happiness and more meaningful connections with others, we have to release the hold that our past has on us.
Deepak Chopra
#2. Then since we mortal lovers are, Ask not how long our love will last; But while it does, let us take care Each minute be with pleasure past: Were it not madness to deny To live because we're sure to die?
Paul Negri
#3. The minute we put aside our self-righteousness and move away from being the aggrieved, then we are on a healing process.
Stephen Richards
#4. 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
#5. This is remembered by everyone even today because, in our thinking, the past takes up more space than the future.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#6. Less than 1 percent of ancient Egypt has been discovered and excavated. With population pressures, urbanization, and modernization encroaching, we're in a race against time. Why not use the most advanced tools we have to map, quantify, and protect our past?
Sarah Parcak
#7. Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#8. For the first time in the history of our country the majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.
Jimmy Carter
#9. We should try to achieve things for ourselves and not rely on former or past family glories with which we have no connection but the arbitrary nature of our birth.
Shirley Franklin
#10. Promise me no promises,
So will I not promise you:
Keep we both our liberties,
Never false and never true:
Let us hold the die uncast,
Free to come as free to go:
For I cannot know your past,
And of mine what can you know?
Christina Rossetti
#11. Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs for ever to the past.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#12. 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
#13. I sincerely believe that the collective efforts of many secularists during the past generation, resulting in the expulsion from our schools and from the public square, has left us vulnerable.
Jerry Falwell
#14. history is our attempt to reconstruct the past from the evidence that remains
Philip Parker
#15. You all know from past experiences that the white man only sees the bad that our people do to them. They are blind to their own indiscretions.
Violetta Botzet Luetgers
#16. 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
#17. Let us ... quietly accept our times, with the firm conviction that just as much good can be done today as at any time in the past, provided only that we have the will and the way to do it.
Etienne Gilson
#18. Many works of the past complete what they announce they are going to do, to our increasing boredom. Certain others plague me because I cannot follow their intentions. I can tell at a glance what Fabritius is doing, but I am spending my life trying to find out what Rembrandt was up to.
Philip Guston
#19. Some of the greatest spiritual revivals in the past occurred just when the situation seemed to be the darkest. In the history of our own nation, for example, countless thousands turned to Christ during the darkest days of the Civil War, setting the stage for national reconciliation later on.
Billy Graham
#20. It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.
Ally Condie
#22. History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations.
M. King Hubbert
#23. Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.
William Faulkner
#24. The past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now. No powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle.
James Hutton
#25. We either allow our past to keep interfering with our optimal expression of love and happiness, or we can move beyond our past with renewed passion for life
Deepak Chopra
#26. Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. "What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America" is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, "our Original Sin.
James W. Loewen
#27. The past has passed; the time for grace is now! Let's respond to the grace of this moment with the gifts of the Spirit active in our lives ...
Kimberly Hahn
#28. In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.
Edmund Burke
#29. It's what we do in our future, that decides how important our past truly was.
Mona Hodgson
#30. Italy remained attached to conservatism. It had a political class that lived in the past and didn't build the future. The past is our strength, but it risks becoming our ruin if we walk with our heads turned backwards.
Matteo Renzi
#31. Beliefs lead us to make decisions based on our past experiences. Principles lead us to make decisions based on what we perceive to be just and righteous.
Philip West
#32. We can't remember things from our future; remembering is merely the privilege and the beauty of the past!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#33. How does it happen? At what point is she born, the baffled, wounded adult of tomorrow? Is eleven what we react to for the rest of our lives?
Kyo Maclear
#34. Out of our deepest memories come the forgotten forms of the past,
given new life by the living sentience of an ancient and eternal forest.
Robert Holdstock
#35. a certain consciousness of our entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen sensibility. And
George Eliot
#36. 5126We are a mongrel race, our past a history of tangles, our sources obscure, our rowdy upbringing full of greedy, short-sighted empires and cruel, wasteful diasporas.
Iain M. Banks
#37. In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past.
Daniel Dennett
#38. Our inability to talk about the past was almost as damaging to our relationship as the past itself.
Leigh Byrne
#39. 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
#40. We are as tired of each other's company as we are of the cold monotony of the black night and of the unpalatable sameness of our food. Physically, mentally, and perhaps morally, then, we are depressed, and from my past experience... I know that this depression will increase.
Jenny Offill
#41. The facts about our past are powerless against the blood of Jesus and the Truth of His Word.
Joyce Meyer
#42. Then I'd be dead," I pointed out. "Among other things. Fool, there is no sense in trying to play
that game with the past. Here is where we are today, and we can only make our moves from here.
Robin Hobb
#43. If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.
Terry Eagleton
#44. When we are in competition with ourselves, and match our todays against our yesterdays, we derive encouragement from past misfortunes and blemishes. Moreover, the competition with ourselves leaves unimpaired our benevolence toward our fellow men.
Eric Hoffer
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Adoption has the dimension of connection - not only to your own tribe, but beyond, widening the scope of what constitutes love, ties and family. It is a larger embrace. By adopting, we stretch past our immediate circles and, by reaching out, find an unexpected sense of belonging with others.
Isabella Rossellini
#48. Memory is that trick by which we see the awful events of the past loom over the good, like mountains over mouse. We don't recall life as it was. Instead, we remember what was different, frightening, or strange, and we turn our lives into the fun-house mirror images of the truth.
Jamie Kain
#49. We are runaway slaves from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them.
Timothy B. Tyson
#50. As the colonel and I sat swapping stories in the plane, a jet aircraft buzzed past our window. I asked the colonel what type of aircraft it was, and he said, "Don't worry about it, Bob ... if you can see it, it's obsolete."
Bob Hope
#51. [Pleasure is what suggested] which behaviors, emotions, social patterns and patterns of taste served us well during our evolutionary history. They were experienced as pleasures and encoded into our formative genetic codes ... deep in the past, from about 100,000 years ago and beyond.
Lionel Tiger
#52. We shouldn't fuel the future with the polluting methods of the past, ... We have the technology to power our future in ways that don't threaten our health or poison our planet. Let's choose to use it.
Denis Hayes
#54. The past is only so heroic as we see it. It is the canvas on which our idea of heroism is painted, and so, in one sense, the dim prospectus of our future field.
Henry David Thoreau
#55. Sometimes it's hard to see past our own broken pieces.
Cora Carmack
#56. A shadow strolled past the car, indifferent to our curbside melodrama. This was my second time imperiled in a a parked vehicle in the space of three hours. I wondered what goonish spectacles I'd overlooked in my own career as a pavement walker.
Jonathan Lethem
#57. Everywhere across whatever sorrows of which our life is woven, some radiant joy will gaily flash past.
Nikolai Gogol
#58. Archaeological discoveries made in Egypt and in the Near East in the past hundred years have opened our eyes to a spiritual and cultural heritage undreamed of by earlier generations.
Samuel Noah Kramer
#59. In that moment, I welcomed back the light and let go of the fear, the feelings of unworthiness, the past, the loss, the wallowing, the grief and the anger. I let go of the illusion of control in our losses, of our afflictions.
Ariana Carruth
#60. The genome of every human cell has memory. You know what that means? As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own.
E.L. Doctorow
#61. In a human development sense, our understanding of leadership has essentially "grown up" and moved past personal ego and a self-centered view of things.
Linda Fisher Thornton
#62. With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.
Edward Bellamy
#63. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#64. Let us not be bitter about the past, but let us keep our eyes firmly on the future.
Sukarno
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. It wasn't enough that they stole our future; they had to steal our past.
Lauren DeStefano
#68. All acts of healing are ultimately our selves healing our Self.
-Ram Dass
Ram Dass
#69. In becoming archaeologists of the world of our mothers, we are trying to retrieve the female past and to invent a future.
Louise Bernikow
#70. We must come to understand our past, our history, in terms of the soil and water and forests and grasses that have made it what it is.
William Vogt
#71. I'm driven by history and our past. That's why I work in gold. It's in your veins. We've been lusting after gold since the beginning of time. God, glory, and gold.
Waris Ahluwalia
#72. After voluntary exertions on the part of our people to which the history of the world furnishes no parallel, is the old root of bitterness still to remain in the ground, to sprout and bear fruit in the future as it has borne fruit in the past?
Robert Dale Owen
#73. A lot of people were wounded in our kitchen and in the week of a car less than a mile away. And the life I had before- the one I had hated so much- was in the past.
Sophie Littlefield
#74. The most positive action we can take about the past is to change our perception of it.
Deepak Chopra
#75. After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.
Michael Mandelbaum
#76. You can be aware of your past without being it.
Geneen Roth
#77. we also discover that much of our most potent creative energy arises from the flames of past injustices and inhibited creative efforts.
Mary-Elaine Jacobsen
#78. What change has made the pastures sweet
And reached the daisies at my feet,
And cloud that wears a golden hem?
This lovely world, the hills, the sward
They all look fresh, as if our Lord
But yesterday had finished them.
Jean Ingelow
#79. I think we're losing sight of what our ultimate goal is here, said Genevieve. But we feared that if she was washed out, people would look right past the flyer.
Joshua Ferris
#80. Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order.
George Herbert Mead
#81. The testimony of every scientist is that the frontiers that are opening out ahead of us now are far wider and more spectacular than any frontier of America in the past. Our horizons are not closed. We are going to write a greater development in America than has ever been conceived.
Eric Johnston
#82. All of us are not born with equal opportunities. But over a period of time, regardless of our parentage, place of birth, prospects in our communities, or education, the day comes when we have to make the choice to let our past teach us - or beat us.
Zig Ziglar
#83. Learn from your past and shut the door behind to live in present.Our past is just like a dry rose which was once a rose with all colors of life, with sweet fragrance, with soft petal, with thorns but now it is left with only thorns which could still hurt.
Ideaswar
#84. If you don't want your past to own you, try owning your past.
Dan Pearce
#85. I think that we honor ourselves by honoring our past.
Jimi Hendrix
#86. Emotion only lasts in our bodies for about 90 seconds. After that, the physical reaction dissipates, UNLESS our cognitive brain kicks in and starts connecting our anger with past events.
Jill Bolte Taylor
#87. Modern humanity's sense of alienation lies in the fact that we have cut ourselves adrift from both the natural world and from the roots of our past.
Philip Carr-Gomm
#88. It would be a ridiculous and unwarranted presumption on our part if we imagined that we were more energetic or more intelligent than the men of the past - our material knowledge has increased, but not our intelligence.
C. G. Jung
#89. Knowledge is the rediscovering of our own insight.
Plato
#90. The pathway traced with blood and tears,
and dust of all our father's dead,
Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red,
Fade to the mist of nameless years.
("The Testimony of the Suns")
George Sterling
#91. It seems we're not only uninformed about our present, we're ignorant of our past.
Adora Svitak
#92. If we are not happy with where our past decisions have led us, then the place to start is with our current thinking process.
Jim Rohn
#93. We also recommit to supporting tribal self-determination, security, and prosperity for all Native Americans. While we cannot erase the scourges or broken promises of our past, we will move ahead together in writing a new, brighter chapter in our joint history.
Barack Obama
#94. Words enable us to transfer our thoughts from inside our own mind into the mind of another. They have the power to alter history, to describe the past, and to bring meaning and substance to the present.
Jim Rohn
#95. [...]we are all as full of echoes as a rocky wood--echoes of the past, reflex echoes of the future, and echoes of the soil (these last reverberating through our filmiest dreams, like the sound of thunder in a blossoming orchard).
Mary Webb
#96. We've done a lot of research on the characteristics of our teachers who are the most successful. The most predictive trait is still past demonstrated achievement, and all selection research basically points to that.
Wendy Kopp
#97. Who we are at any given moment is a combination of our past experiences, present situation, and potential future.
Erica Ridley
#98. Oh hours of childhood,
when behind each shape more than the past appeared
and what streamed out before us was not the future.
We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half for the sake
of those with nothing left but their grownupness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#99. 'One Yellow Daffodil' is both a look to the past and to the future and expresses my belief in the great spirit and strength of our children.
David A. Adler
#100. But our own selves are like pearls, created by layer after layer of present laid over past until the original thing is completely hidden.
Tad Williams
