“The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”
“If you're going to be able to look back on something and laugh about it, you might as well laugh about it now.”
“Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.”
“It is not the literal past, the ''facts'' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.”
“Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own fortune, and he inherits his own past.”
“Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.”
“I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.”
“Yesterday is a canceled check: Forget it. Tomorrow is a promissory note: Don't count on it. Today is ready cash: Use it!”
“You must never regret what might have been. The past that did not happen is as hidden from us as the future we cannot see.”
“It's linkage I'm talking about, and harmonies and structures, And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.”
“All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put the past together again. So let's remember: Don't try to saw sawdust.”
“If you are carrying strong feelings about something that happened in your past, they may hinder your ability to live in the present.”
“If you're still hanging onto a dead dream of yesterday, laying flowers on its grave by the hour, you cannot be planting the seeds for a new dream to grow today.”
“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”
“There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternally new now that builds and creates itself out of the Best as the past withdraws.”
“Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but of what men believe happened.”
“If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.”
“The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips.”
“The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects --making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.”
“The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.”
“Mr. Meant-to has a friend, his name is Didn't-Do. Have you met them? They live together in a house called Never-Win. And I am told that it is haunted by the Ghost of Might-have-Been.”
“Because men really respect only that which was founded of old and has developed slowly, he who wants to live on after his death must take care not only of his posterity but even more of his past.”
“The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.”
“The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?”
“If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotized by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change.”
“I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.”
“What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”
“A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.”
“One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.”
“That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.”