Quotes on Past

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Your lordship, though not clean past your youth, have yet some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltiness of time.

The swiftness of time is infinite, as is still more evident when we look back on the past.

Those spacious regions where our fancies roam,_x000D_ _x000D_ Pain'd by the past, expecting ills to come,_x000D_ _x000D_ In some dread moment, by the fates assign'd,_x000D_ _x000D_ Shall pass away, nor leave a rack behind;_x000D_ _x000D_ And Time's revolving wheels shall lose at last_x000D_ _x000D_ The speed that spins the future and the past:_x000D_ _x000D_ And, sovereign of an undisputed throne,_x000D_ _x000D_ Awful eternity shall reign alone.

The time will come when every change shall cease,_x000D_ _x000D_ This quick revolving wheel shall rest in peace:_x000D_ _x000D_ No summer then shall glow, not winter freeze;_x000D_ _x000D_ Nothing shall be to come, and nothing past,_x000D_ _x000D_ But an eternal now shall ever last.

But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past are certain to miss the future.

Here between the hither and the farther shore_x000D_ _x000D_ While time is withdrawn, consider the future_x000D_ _x000D_ And the past with an equal mind.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

Time, though in Eternity, applied_x000D_ _x000D_ To motion, measures all things durable_x000D_ _x000D_ By present, past, and future.

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back _x000D_ _x000D_ Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, _x000D_ _x000D_ A great-sized monster of ingratitudes: _x000D_ _x000D_ Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour'd _x000D_ _x000D_ As fast as they are made, forgot as soon as done.

What's gone, and what's past help, Should be past grief.

The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

...your memories will be muddled and uncataloged - past, present, and imagination all mixed together. The same thing happens in dreams.

When the moment comes to stop running from your past, to turn around and face the thing you thought you could not face--the moment when your life teeters between giving up and getting up--when that moment comes, and it always comes, if you can't get up and you can't give up either, here's what you do: Crawl.

Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha? She had shaken her head slowly. Men and women who can't get over their past . . . That's what ghosts are.

I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall.

Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it'd really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.

Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.