Best Past Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.”

“The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.”

“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.”

“The past is a ghost, the future a dream and all we ever have is now.”

“There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.”

“But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until — later of sooner — perhaps — no, not perhaps — quite certainly: it will come.”

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.”

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

“It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.”

“When we feel lost in time, with only shadows of the past living in our mind; when the moment, which “was", no longer "is” and when only silence remains, loads of questions arise. We can cry a river or we may wonder: “What went wrong?”

“When we are “time traveling”, we may trip over problems from the past which distort our memory. If we are weary of dealing with lost causes or lame ducks in our history, we have to make up our mind and give up destructive thinking patterns. At that juncture, time has come to go back to the future. ( “A glimpse of the future" )”

“My past is everything I failed to be.”

“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.”

“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.”

“If we take the time to unravel the surreptitious fragments from the past that are veiled in the muddle and jumble of our memory, we may single out the essentials for the present that might be best shots for the future. (Never looking back again", )”

“Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered for they are gone forever.”

“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”

“I shall not dwell in the past...”

“No future can be built without the past and no past is without its future. The present is absence and mediation of past and future.”

“Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding.”

“Even if yesterday was wildly successful, I still don’t want to repeat it. Rather, I want to build on it.”

“Sometimes we have to soak ourselves in the tears and fears of the past to water our future gardens.”

“My past has not defined me, destroyed me, deterred me, or defeated me; it has only strengthened me.”

“You don’t get over it. You move past it. You move through it. You lose yourself to find it, and when found, it’s yours and no longer theirs.”

“All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.”

“I was aware that we were both silently making those inevitable comparisons, putting our relationship in context. She is more this and less that. He is better or worse in these ways. It is human nature to do this--unless its your first relationship, which might be the very reason that your first relationship feels special and remains forever sacred. But the older you get, the more cynical you become, and the more complicated and convoluted the exercise is. You begin to realize that nothing is perfect, that there are trade-offs and sacrifices. The worst is when someone in your past trumps the person in the present, and you think to yourself: if I'd known this, then maybe I wouldn't have let him go.”

“You’re just another story I can’t tell anymore.”

“Trust is not a gasoline-soaked blanket that succumbs to the matches of betrayal, never able to be used for its warmth again; it’s a tapestry that wears thin in places, but can be patched over if you have the right materials, circumstances, and patience to repair it. If you don’t, you’re always the one who feels the coldest when winter comes.”

“People don't get to our ages without having pasts. I'm more interested in the future.”

“We cherish all the past, we glide a-down the present, awake yet dreaming; but the future of ours together—there the bird sings loudest, and the sun shines always there...”

“Past and Present I know well; each is a friend and sometimes an enemy to me. But it is the quiet, beckoning Future, an absolute stranger, with whom I have fallen madly in love.”

“Three rules to obey!”

“I didn't know that I've completely left them all in the past. There's a part of me, wishing and hoping, that she would come back for me, and we would start a new life together, but she didn't.”

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.”

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”

“I do not forget the hope promised by the future, even though I weep for the pain suffered by my land here in the past.”

“For remember," he said, "that it is altogether your world now. You and all the rest. We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control. The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in your hands--your hands and the hands of the children of all men on this earth. The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.”

“I decided I would not go to court to have my mother declared incompetent, I would not fight. I put the car in drive and hit the gas. I felt as if I'd jumped off a sinking ship and was in a life raft with my little girl, my face turned away from the horror, rowing, rowing, as fast and as hard as I could in the opposite direction.”

“Dear God”

“The past is gone, but today is here, and the future is yet to come, so it doesn't deserve our fear...”

“You only have this very moment to make your present, past, and future happy ones.”

“Emily learned, as everyone does, that happiness is often colored by worry or set-aside grief, even in the moment of happiness. It is rarely pure. But what Emily felt that summer, until the end of it, came close. It was the kind of happiness whose only worry is the loss of that happiness.”

“There were times it made one happy to be a fool. It made you feel that you were driving straight back into the past.”

“The ethereal past had blinded him, and the highest happiness he could dream was a return to it.”

“Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.”

“We are all a little schizophrenic. Each of us has three different people living inside us every day—who you were, who you are and who you will become. The road to sanity is to recognize those identities, in order to know who you are today.”

“Let today be the day you finally release yourself from the imprisonment of past grudges and anger. Simplify your life. Let go of the poisonous past and live the abundantly beautiful present... today.”

“Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.”

“Your unhappiness cannot be blamed on your past or your environment. And it isn’t that you lack competence. You just lack courage. One might say you are lacking in the courage to be happy.”

“Happiness is a flow between a playful construction and a painful deconstruction, undulating from a hampering past into a liberating 'now,' escorting a meandering flood of twists and turns, caressing the velvet sand of dreamy beaches or smashing sometimes into the rocks of reality. ("New York at arm's length of desire")”

“My past has not defined me, destroyed me, deterred me, or defeated me; it has only strengthened me.”

“Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past.”

“Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?”

“My best day ever. Got up. Had breakfast. Came to school. Bored, as usual. Wishing I wasn't there, like usual. Kids ignoring me, suits me fine. Sitting with the other retards—we’re so special. Wasting my time. Yesterday was the same, and it's gone, anyway. Tomorrow may never come. There is only today. This is the best day and the worst day. Actually it's crap.”

“Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.”

“I don't want to be caught with my pants down.”

“My house says to me, "Do not leave me, for here dwells your past.”

“I don’t think so, said the captain. Their ship is clearly outfitted with weapons systems that it did not have when it left Terrene over 600 years ago. And they are pointed directly at us.”

“The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.”

“To learn the lessons of the past is to break the chains that would seek to hold us there.”

“Because my past does not make the sum of me. I'm free to move on and let my life lessons put the wind behind the rest of my life.”

“The past is a garden of wilted onions; we weep not because we’re sad, but because we finally remembered to water them.”

“Life on the run was filled with dreams, some at night during sleep, real dreams, and some when the mind was awake but drifting. Most were terrifying, the nightmares of the shadows growing bolder and larger. Others were pleasant wishes of a rosy future, free of the past. These were rare, Patrick had learned. Life on the run was life in the past. There was no closure”

“You think your past defines you, and worse, you think that it is an unchangeable reality, when really, your perception of it changes as you do.”

“The past is called the past for a reason. If you are constantly looking behind you, your eyes aren't on the road ahead. You don't drive the car that way, so why should you live your life that way?”

“How to win in life:”

“Into my heart an air that kills”

“I wanted the past to go away, I wanted”

“I’ve watched hundreds of deed transfers take place right here on the steps of the Registry,” Michele mused. “At those moments of transfer, I’ve seen in the eyes of desperate sellers an emotional reconciliation of irrevocably relinquishing a homestead, a treasured dominion, willingly or otherwise. Perhaps all these deeds, Mr. Geoffrey…perhaps they, too, have their own soul, a predilection that would tell me more than what they say if only I had the capacity to ask.”

“I’ve got my Sig and I’m in a car I swiped,” Bert raged on.” I thought of that much ahead. I don’t miss! It’s like candy, Sammy. His car is candy red. Like Valentine’s Day for me!” I ain’t gonna let a perfect moment pass, Sammy. I’m my own man now in this stuff. I done enough already to earn the respect I don’t get. I’m not stupid, so go to bed.”

“The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth (Niels Bohr)." By this, he means that we require a larger reading of the human past, of our relations with each other, the universe and God, a retelling of our older tales to encompass many truths and to let us grow with change.”

“I’ll tell you another secret, this one for your own good. You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. You may think there’s something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of.”

“The truth is not so important as the leaving of it behind.”

“Trust me Dani. You don’t want’a miss this. I’m not exaggeratin’ when I say the journey of a lifetime, of a hundred lifetimes, is just below us!”

“We have to know the truth about the past to discover out future.”

“I know he says it’s a mind upload problem,” said Aideen. “But we won’t know that for sure until we get there. And maybe not even then if he restricts our access to the outside world of 2253.”

“If today is not your day,”

“In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.”

“... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.”

“People tend to look on the beliefs of the past as being primitive and unintelligent, yet we are seeing more truth in the past every day.”

“What was the point of trying to run away if people were going to insist on reminding you of what you were running from?”

“After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?”

“Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.”

“...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.”

“How many people long for that "past, simpler, and better world," I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?”

“You cannot change what happened. You cannot unsay the words, unmake the choices, remove the circumstances that arrived without your permission and shaped you in ways you would not have chosen. That territory is closed. But how you carry what happened — what meaning you make of it, what it teaches you, what you build from it, what kind of person you decide to become in the light of having lived through it — that territory remains entirely open. The past does not have the authority to determine your future. It has the authority only to inform it. And informing is not the same as determining. What you do with what you have lived through — the wisdom you extract from it, the compassion it produces in you, the understanding of yourself and of others that it has made possible — that is still yours to shape.”

“You can't be a rebel without the scars that come with it. Truth is, some days scars are just as ugly as they are beautiful.”

“Good...if you've done things you aren't proud of. It means you have a conscience.”

“Every time we choose our past over our present we kill our future.”

“Accept the past as the past and realize that each new day you are a new person who doesn’t need to carry old baggage into the new day with you. It’s amazing how many people ruin the beauty of today with the sorrows of yesterday. Yesterday doesn’t exist anymore! For example, if ever I feel foolish or guilty about something I’ve done, I learn from it and attempt to do better the next time. Shame or guilt serves no one. Such feelings actually keep us down, often lowering the vibrations of those around us, as well. Living in the present moment is the recurring baptism of the soul, forever purifying every new day with a new you.”

“Le passé et le présent sont deux statues incomplètes: l'une a été retirée toute mutilée du débris des âges, l'autre n'a pas encore reçu sa perfection de l'avenir.”

“What you are trying to let go of”

“After his experience with Minos, Nico realized that most spectres held only as much power as you allowed them to have. They pried into your mind, using fear or anger or longing to influence you. Nico had learned to shield himself. Sometimes he could even turn the tables and bend ghosts to his will.”

“Happiness and love need wisdom to navigate life's tides. Insight lets us detach from the weight of the past and embrace the present moment's "timelessness," teaching us to welcome the twists and turns with wonder. (“Love, Happiness, and Insight”)”

“It is not until you change your identity to match your life blueprint that you will understand why everything in the past never worked.”

“If you want to fly on the sky, you need to leave the earth. If you want to move forward, you need to let go the past that drags you down.”

“Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don't add up. They don't even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we understand the experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy.”

“Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time.”