Past Quotes

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
-George Orwell

"He who controls the past controls the future."
-George Orwell

"You can't base your life on the past or the present. You have to tell me about your future."
-Chuck Palahniuk

"When you understand that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be."
-Chuck Palahniuk

"People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future."
-Chuck Palahniuk

"We ought not to look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dear-brought experience."
-George Washington

"We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it."
-Lyndon B. Johnson

"Study the past if you would define the future."
-Confucius

"The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it."
-Wendell Berry

"By forgetting the past and by throwing myself into other interests, I forget to worry."
-Jack Dempsey

"The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as the generation gap."
-Spiro T. Agnew

"I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there."
-Herb Caen

"Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter."
-William Ralph Inge

"I look back on my life like a good day's work; it was done and I am satisfied with it."
-Anna Mary Robertson Moses

"The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character."
-Isabelle Eberhardt

"The old days were the old days. And they were great days. But now is now."
-Don Rickles

"The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future."
-Marshall McLuhan

"Look not mournfully into the past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future, without fear."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down."
-A. Whitney Brown

"To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together; to wish to do greater; these are the essential conditions which make up a people."
-Ernest Renan

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment."
-Buddha

"In this bright future you can't forget your past."
-Bob Marley

"If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?"
-George Orwell

"The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly."
-Buddha

"Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it. ."
-Soren Kierkegaard

"For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself."
-Sir Winston Churchill

"It might be said that Lord Rosebery outlived his future by ten years and his past by more than twenty."
-Sir Winston Churchill

"Forgiveness is letting go of the hope that the past can be changed."
-Oprah Winfrey