quotations about the past
Men attach more or less importance to past and future events according as they are more or less engaged in action and the busy scenes of life. Those who have a fortune to make, or are in pursuit of rank and power, think little of the past, for it does not contribute greatly to their views: those who have nothing to do but to think, take nearly the same interest in the past as in the future. The contemplation of the one is as delightful and real as that of the other. The season of hope has an end; but the remembrance of it is left.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
"On the Past and Future", Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
The past is a closed door.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
EUGENE O'NEILL
A Moon for the Misbegotten
As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action. What its great thinkers have thought and written on the deepest problems of life, shall we not hear and enjoy?
FELIX ADLER
Founding address of New York Society for Ethical Culture, May 15, 1876
Sometimes we need a map of the past. It helps us to understand the present, and to plan the future.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
I think we all agree, the past is over.
GEORGE W. BUSH
Dallas Morning News, May 10, 2000
Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Dance Dance Dance
Inheriting the past is to take part in a story that is still being told today.
LEO WU
"Where the past meets the present: Preserving historic homes in Alhambra", Alhambra Source, March 27, 2016
The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.
EUGENE O'NEILL
Long Day's Journey Into Night
We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into.
JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN
Pulphead
The myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
ZADIE SMITH
White Teeth
We are afraid to dwell upon the past, lest it should retard our future progress; the indulgence of ease is fatal to excellence; and to succeed in life, we lose the ends of being!
WILLIAM HAZLITT
"On the Past and Future", Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
When we look back on our past there is often an element of fiction that enters the picture. The colours seem brighter or darker, the people more delightful or cruel, events are collapsed, mixed and reconfigured. Nevertheless our visions seem utterly convincing, at least to ourselves.
LAETITIA WILSON
"Questions at the heart of identity", The West Australian, April 1, 2016
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Atoms of Thought
Evidence about the past is always partial, perspectival, and biased.
GEORGE WECKMAN
"Remembering the past", The Athens Messenger, April 1, 2016
To remember is to re-member, almost as if by re-membering we give something body again. It is no longer so much in the past, but being called to mind and brought into the present. To re-member is to re-present. And so we are saying that something in the past is not gone, it is here and now, in effect, if nothing else.
PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA
"Past Painfully Present", America Magazine, March 28, 2016
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
It's harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future.
WILLIAM GIBSON
The Paris Review, summer 2011