Top 100 Us Past Quotes
#1. We can cherish nothing less than our random understanding of death and the earth-shaking love that draws us to one another ... Cleanliness and valor will be our watchwords. Nothing less will get us past the armed sentry and over the mountainous border.
John Cheever
#2. God lead us past the setting of the sun
To wizard islands, of august surprise;
God make our blunders wise.
Vachel Lindsay
#4. We all need lots of powerful long range goals to help us past the short-term obstacles
Jim Rohn
#5. They're all inside of us, ... past people and present people. And probably even the people we'll become.
Jacqueline Woodson
#6. Love seems to survive life, and to reach beyond it. I think we take it with us past the grave. Do we not still give it to those who have left us? May we not hope that they feel it for us, and that we shall leave it here in one or two fond bosoms, when we also are gone?
William Makepeace Thackeray
#7. As the two of us - past self, my present self - hovered over her bed, I could see each cruel damage written across her skin, beneath her eyes, down into her bones. She was no longer the way she wanted to be remembered. She was already more breath than body.
David Levithan
#8. 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
#9. And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.
Peter Matthiessen
#10. Nix," I said, and her name was a poem. She tilted her face up to the dawn; my lips met hers. She pressed close to me, and then there was no past, no future - only now. No her, no me. Only us.
Heidi Heilig
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. No matter where we are today or what mistakes we've made in the past, He has given us everything we need to glorify Him right now.
Joshua Harris
#19. Resentment, the emotion that, Jane Amery would write, 'nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past.'
Laura Hillenbrand
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. The past is important. It is the past that helps make us who we are.
Elizabeth Morgan
#23. 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
#24. For this equilibrium now in sight, let us trust that mankind, as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past, will find for itself a new code of ethics, common to all, made of tolerance, of courage, and of faith in the Spirit of men.
Albert Claude
#25. Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory.
Andre Breton
#26. Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It's over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don't.
Arundhati Roy
#27. Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion - and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined.
Daniel Kahneman
#28. Rebecca Black might sing like a robot, but that's just proof she has evolved beyond us. Her vocal is just a slightly exaggerated version of the robot glitch-twitch stutter that's been mainstream pop vocalese for the past 10 years or so.
Rob Sheffield
#29. Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.
Peter Thiel
#30. But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
William Butler Yeats
#31. [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
#32. How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time, the past and the future, in which all things disappear.
Marcus Aurelius
#33. Sometimes it is more comfortable to live in the past. It is where you have already been, what you already know. It is because the future is unknown that it scares us. But the future is here, and you cannot stop it. Embrace it because one day this future will be the past you may want to revisit.
Matthew A. DeBettencourt
#34. 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
#35. The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.
William Morris
#36. This book is about fighting back. The dominant culture -civilization- is killing the planet, and it is long past time for those of us who care about life on earth to begin taking the actions necessary to stop this culture from destroying every living thing.
Derrick Jensen
#37. We may be finished with the past but the past is not finished with us.
Donald Riggio
#38. We have a history," I say, "that no one can take from us. No matter what happened in the past, no matter what happens from here, it can't take away from the good thing we had. You were my first love, Demi. You only get one.
Winter Renshaw
#39. Remember us, Belle," Cyllinus wept, "when the dangers are past and you sit upon the throne in Greenreach. Think of us. Do not forget me, little one.
Robin Jarvis
#40. There's no need for us to be held back by the past or how things have been so far. The important thing is what seeds we are sowing now for the future.
Daisaku Ikeda
#41. God is more powerful than anybody's past, no matter how wretched. He can make us forget - not by erasing the memory but by taking the sting and paralyzing effect out of it
Jim Cymbala
#42. I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past, perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology has put us beyond the lessons of the past.
J. Rufus Fears
#43. Let us not be bitter about the past, but let us keep our eyes firmly on the future.
Sukarno
#44. 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
#45. I probably prefer Spanish football to the others. It's very technical, the way they play; they keep the ball well, and whenever Spurs have played against Spanish teams in the past, they've always made it difficult for us.
Gareth Bale
#46. The holidays drape us in magic and give us the hope that we can do better than we have done in the past.
Toni Sorenson
#47. The past is the anchor that weighs us down.
Don Trowden
#48. We can gain experience from the past, but we cant relive it. But we can hope for the future, Its always along side us, on the inside of us looking out. The past should not be allowed to evaporate but should exist only in memories.
Sean Sullivan
#49. We know we need, and so we acquire and eat and eat, past the point of bodily fullness, trying to sate a greater need. Ashamed of this, we turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how to not-need.
Marya Hornbacher
#50. God has given us a message that is not only for past times and this time, but for all time.
Billy Graham
#51. If I Must Go
If I must go to heaven's end
Climbing the ages like a stair,
Be near me and forever bend
With the same eyes above me there;
Time will fly past us like leaves flying,
We shall not heed, for we shall be
Beyond living, beyond dying,
Knowing and known unchangeably.
Sara Teasdale
#52. Don't swear at your past; you couldn't existed without it! It is the only path to reach today and tomorrow! Remember that past is a great teacher who thought us all we know now!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#53. We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.
Learned Hand
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.
Richard Ford
#57. It isn't the past which holds us back, it's the future; and how we undermine it, today.
Viktor E. Frankl
#59. There is no past, memory paints it,' " the pope recited. " 'There is no future, for hope shapes it. There is only the present, but it is always escaping us.
David I. Kertzer
#60. All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#61. There is no weakness in crying. If we do not sorrow over what hurts us, how do we ever go past it? I have shed many a tear myself, Barbara Devane, over what life has brought me. Compassion can come from great pain, if you allow it. But compassion takes courage. Bitterness is easier.
Karleen Koen
#62. 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
#63. What a strange joy it was to talk, to fish gleefully into the past and fling its fragments about us, with the unfailing aroma of pleasantness that pasts always seem to possess!
Anne Bosworth Greene
#64. For every moment that is past, the angel of death keeps taking the part that is dead and we keeping living in the present. The parasite wants us to carry the past with us and that makes it so heavy to be alive.
Miguel Ruiz
#65. What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather
#66. 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
#67. The past lives through us. We are its legacy.
Marty Rubin
#68. But as Hegel teaches us, beginnings are necessarily problematic. (As are endings.) How can I describe my first encounter with Ana fairly, when my understanding of her essence has passed through infinite iterations over the past four and a half years? My
Alena Graedon
#69. 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
#70. You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.
It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us.
Stefan Molyneux
#71. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.
Mother Teresa
#72. It is a sad commentary that today we face a choice between having schools that are a monument to our past - or schools that will be the lifeblood of our future. But since that is our choice, let us resolve to choose wisely.
Ted Kulongoski
#73. Ghosts are everywhere, not just the ghost of Momma in the woods, but ghosts of us too, what we used to be like in those long summers.
Eve Chase
#74. And right action is freedom from past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim never to be realized. Who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. The Dry Salvages
T. S. Eliot
#75. Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future.
Gregory David Roberts
#76. Children have neither past nor future;
they enjoy the present, which very few of us do.
Jean De La Bruyere
#77. The past is with me; the present is here. The future is unmapped and changeable. Ours for the imagining: spreading out before us. Sunlight filled, deep blue, and the darkness.
Cath Crowley
#78. Each breath we take brings us to, and past, a crossroads in life, and there is no turning back.
Dan Burns
#79. The habit of shutting doors behind us is invaluable to happiness; we must learn to shut life's doors to cut out the futile wind of past mistakes.
Marjorie Holmes
#80. Know what? (Wulf) If halflings live past twenty-seven. But then anything is possible. I say in a few months we should pop us some Orville Redenbacher's, then sit back and enjoy the show. (Spawn)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#81. The spiritual journey, the path of recovery and personal growth, is a detoxification process in which we bring up and out the negative beliefs we have carried with us from the past and that now poison the present.
Marianne Williamson
#82. I loved her for so long. Our past trails behind us like a comet's tail, the future stretched out before us like the universe. Things happen. People get lost and love breaks.
Jonathan Tropper
#83. ...Past joys and achievements give us the outlines of how to get to a state of happiness again. That memory is a treasure that can never be taken away. At least we know where we were, what we have lost, what we miss and what more to add to our experiences.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#84. MOTHER TIME: The past is always with us, dear, for better or worse. It is what it is and you can't change it. All you can do is learn how to live with it in the present.
Hillary DePiano
#85. What can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.
William Carlos Williams
#86. What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
Jorge Luis Borges
#87. Let us remember the past with gratitude, live the present with enthusiasm, and look forward to the future with confidence.
Pope John Paul II
#88. Don't live in regret! It is such a useless idea.
Use the memory to prevent us do bad things!
Regret is a childish wish, or an empty hope,
trying to revise the bitter memory of the past.
Toba Beta
#89. Shakespeare doesn't belong to the past. If his material is valid, it is valid now. It's like coal. The only meaningfulness of a piece of coal starts and finishes with its combustion, giving us light and heat. And that to me is Shakespeare.
Peter Brook
#90. If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant past
Security in human systems we're told will always always last
Emotions are the sail and blind faith is the mast
Without the breath of real freedom we're getting nowhere fast.
(History Will Teach Us Nothing)
Sting
#91. [O]urs is a culture of the perpetual present, one that deliberately severs itself from the past that created us as well as the future we are shaping with our actions.
Naomi Klein
#92. I will not let us be beings of regret. I know my past. What I want is my future.
Roshani Chokshi
#93. It is knowledge that binds us; shared wisdom from ages past and new wisdom that we should all seek to embrace. Wisdom is our legacy; our refuge from the world of the ignorant and foolish. We chose this path that we might walk open-eyed into the future... undaunted by fear and lies.
Ted Naifeh
#94. It has always seemed to me that any man is a better man for being a hunter. This sport confers a certain constant alertness, and develops a certain ruggedness of character ... Moreover, it allies us to the pioneer past. In a deep sense, this great land of ours was won for us by hunters.
Archibald Rutledge
#95. I think President Obama is trying to deceive the public in pretending that he was not a part of Congress that has made some decisions in the past that got us to where we are today.
Sarah Palin
#96. There is an opportunity for us to renew ourselves. There's an opportunity for us to leave the past behind and present something different for the future.
Jay Weatherill
#97. Future will forgive us but are you ready to forgive your past?
J. Limbu
#98. I wondered if this would be our battle. He would always fear that I would leave, and I was afraid his past would forever haunt us.
Adriane Leigh
#99. Memories, James thought, thank God we have them. They help us to recall what's long gone, and we can live again in the past with those we once loved.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
#100. Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form ... The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.
[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]
Jean-Henri Fabre
