Past Is The Past Present Quotes & Sayings

Come, go with us, speak fair; you may salve so,
Not what is dangerous present, but the los
Of what is past. — William Shakespeare

Change only happens in the present moment. The past is already done. The future is just energy and intention. — Kino MacGregor

I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying ... nameless ... — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman. — Andrea Dworkin

Like sex, poverty and power, suicide may always be with us. But like them again, the actual form is takes is essentially time-specific and culture-bound, not only in the past but in the present too. The people who took their lives, the paths which led them to that end, and the experience of dying in this way were deeply influenced by specific historical circumstances. Only by making a greater effort at historical understanding can this most secret house of death be made to yield up more of its confidences. — David Cannadine

My past is an echo of my perfect present being the shadow of my stellar future. — Lyna Jones

The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past. — Erica Jong

The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. — G.K. Chesterton

I had begun to grasp, in the past few weeks, one of the great and uncovenanted delights of Greece; a pre-coming of age present in my case: a direct and immediate link, friendly and equal on either side, between human beings, something which melts barriers of hierarchy and background and money and, except for a few tribal and historic feuds, politics and nationality as well... Existence, these glances say, is a torment, an enemy, an adventure and a joke which we are in league to undergo, outwit, exploit and enjoy on equal terms as accomplices, fellow-hedonists and fellow-victims. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

...our low regard for nostalgia often seems not to rest on some substantive standard of excellence, in light of which a preference for the past is seen as missing the mark, but rather expresses idolatry of the present. This kind of "forward-thinking" is at bottom an apologetic species of conservatism, as it defers to and celebrates whatever is currently ascendant. — Matthew B. Crawford

Nothing in the past is as powerful as what we choose to do in the present moment. — Louise Hay

To learn from the past is good, but to live there is a waste. To plan for the future is good, but to live there is a waste. You are happiest and most productive in life when you are living in the present. — Kenneth H. Blanchard

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard. — Penelope Lively

The past is the father of the present. — Agatha Christie

What an amazing creative way to magnify, and illuminate the courage of 30 Sheroes whose courage, leadership and character is symbolic of the many unsung Women Sheroes of past and present. — Emory Douglas

'Mixtape' is a very appropriate word to include in the title of Goran Hugo Olsson's film because it includes a rich mixture of cultural voices. They speak across different dividing lines such as those of haves and have-nots, youth and maturity, black and white, national and global, and the past and the present. — Aberjhani

[I]t is rather the past and the future which are the fleeting illusions, and the present which is eternally real. We discover that the linear succession of time is a convention of our single-track verbal thinking, of a consciousness which interprets the world by grasping little pieces of it, calling them things and events. But every such grasp of the mind excludes the rest of the world, so that this type of consciousness can get an approximate vision of the whole only through a series of grasps, one after the other. — Alan W. Watts

We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own. — Blaise Pascal

Under the sublime law of progress, the present outgrows the past. The great heart of humanity is heaving with the hopes of a brighter day. All the higher instincts of our nature prophesy its approach; and the best intellects of the race are struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfilment. — Horace Mann

The past is over; the present is fleeting; we live in the future. — Ray Kurzweil

At that stage of your life, there'll be no past or future for you; until I give you my breast, you'll have no memory of contentment in the past nor expectation of relief in the future. Once you begin nursing, everything will be in reverse, and all will be right with the world. NOW is the only moment you'll perceive; you'll live in the present tense. In many ways, it's an enviable state. — Ted Chiang

The grief of a child is always terrible. It is bottomless, without hope. A child has no past and no future. It just lives in the present moment - wholeheartedly. If the present moment spells disaster, the child suffers it with his whole heart, his whole soul, his whole strength, his whole little being ... — Maria Franziska Von Trapp

Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. — Ed Catmull

I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?" She studied him, her eyes grave. "Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present. — Stephen King

In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body. — William James

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past. — Susan Sontag

It is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone. Even this burden, too, can be lessened if you confine it strictly to its own limits. — Marcus Aurelius

The necessity of starting life afresh on new foundations. That these foundations must be of social justice, of rational organization, of respect for the individual, of liberty, is for me an obvious fact which, little by little, is asserting itself out of the very inhumanity of the present time. The future seems to me, despite the clouds on the horizon, to be full of possibilities vaster than any we have glimpsed in the past. The passion, the experience, and even the errors of my fighting generation may perhaps help illumine the way forward, but on one condition, which has become an absolute imperative: never give up the defense of man against systems whose plans crush the individual. — Victor Serge

I feel like the blues is actually some kind of documentary of the past and the present - and something to give people inspiration for the future. — Willie Dixon

The best way of preparing for the future is to take good care of the present, because we know that if the present is made up of the past, then the future will be made up of the present. All we need to be responsible for is the present moment. Only the present is within our reach. To care for the present is to care for the future. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Why is it that our many mental institutions are overcrowded? People will not take their time. They do not live in the present! For are not all fears, phobias, crippling anxieties tied in with the future - a time that has not yet come - and may not? And are not deep depressions, melancholias, and foolish guilt complexes connected with the past - a time that is gone, and is gone forever - a time that cannot be changed even by God Almighty? These dementias most certainly bespeak some relation to the fact that those plagued with them have not been objective enough to stay in contact with the one great gratuitous reality called now. — M. Raymond

I deeply understood that there is no such thing as an isolated act. This particular act had looped and wrapped and folded in on itself and other acts, pushed forward, pulled a hidden past into the present, and placed it in front of me as if to say: Isn't this a fine moment? Who knew? — Patricia Florin

The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. — Alexandra Monir

Meditation is not meant to help us avoid problems or run away from difficulties. It is meant to allow positive healing to take place. To meditate is to learn how to stop - to stop being carried away by our regrets about the past, our anger or despair in the present, or our worries about the future. — Nhat Hanh

There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now. — Eugene O'Neill

The negative feelings of anger, bitterness, guilt, regret, resentment, and sadness represent a failure of a person to accept that the past is an event that holds no power over the present. The thought that the future will bring salvation is an illusion. We must exist in the present. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting: that our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any of us as are the present and the past. — Dean Koontz

The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history. — Pyotr Kropotkin

I am part of the Fellowship of the Unashamed ... My past is redeemed, my present makes sense, and my future is in God's hands ... I am a disciple of Jesus. I must go till he comes, give until I drop, speak out until all know, and work until he stops me. — Patrick Madrid

Marx wrote that 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

It is quite natural to think of the self as something concrete, but it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Rather, it is an abstract product of our minds, a convenient concept or schema that enables us to relate our present self with our past, future, and conditional selves, and thereby to create an illusion of coherence and continuity from a big jumble of disparate experiences. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum total of our ego defences, and that it is therefore tantamount to one gigantic ego defence, namely, the ego itself. The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home. — Neel Burton

The beauty of America is that I don't have to deny my past to affirm my present. No one does. We can love this nation like a parent and still embrace our ancestral home like cherished grandparents. — Mario Cuomo

The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss. — Jared Diamond

We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that ... Also watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence ... you wait till later to find out what the sentence means ... The present is always changing the past. — Alan W. Watts

Memory is the keyword which combines past with present, past and future. — Elie Wiesel

The spiritual journey, the path of recovery and personal growth, is a detoxification process in which we bring up and out the negative beliefs we have carried with us from the past and that now poison the present. — Marianne Williamson

My policy is to learn from the past, focus on the present, and dream about the future. I'm a firm believer in learning from adversity. Often the worst of times can turn to your advantage - my life is a study of that. — Donald Trump

Once you uncover the history of this pattern and trace its roots, you will see that your reaction in the present moment is really a reaction from the past, a shadow character's attempt to protect you from reexperiencing an old emotional wound, which instead sabotages you in the present. — Connie Zweig

Forgotten tones of love recur to us, and kind glances shine out of the past
oh so bright and clear!
oh so longed after!
because they are out of reach; as holiday music from within a prison wall
or sunshine seen through the bars; more prized because unattainable
more bright because of the contrast of present darkness and solitude, whence there is no escape. — William Makepeace Thackeray

A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember. — Aristotle.

Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present. — Herbert Butterfield

He once told an interviewer, "I'm impatient with the past and irritable with the present. The future is where my concern lies, and I'm very optimistic about it. — Sharon M. Moen

The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment. — J. Michael Straczynski

There are no accidents in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite. — Abraham Lincoln

History in Burckhardt's words is 'the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.' The past is intelligible to us only in light of the present; and we can fully understand the present only in light of the past. To enable man to understand the society of the past and to increase his mastery over the society of the present is the dual function of history. — Edward Hallett Carr

Oh, glorious Art!" thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeing moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for at thy touch, all that is great becomes forever present; and illustrious men live through long ages in the visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

There is only one courage and that is the courage to go on dying to the past, not to collect it, not to accumulate it, not to cling to it. We all cling to the past and because we cling to the past we become unavailable to the present. — Rajneesh

When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light. — Ian McEwan

because what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted. — Ralph Ellison

If all the evidence put forward for the authenticity of religious teachings originates in the past, it is natural to look round and see whether the present, about which it is easier to form judgements, may not also be able to furnish evidence of the sort. If by this means we could succeed in clearing even a single portion of the religious system from doubt, the whole of it would gain enormously in credibility. — Sigmund Freud

And is it that the haze of grief
Makes former gladness loom so great?
The lowness of the present state,
That sets the past in this relief?

Or that the past will always win
A glory from its being far;
And orb into the perfect star
We saw not when we moved therein? — Alfred Tennyson

Men spend their lives in anticipations, - in determining to be vastly happy at some period when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other - it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future have not come. We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer the tasting of them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age. — Charles Caleb Colton

How foolish is man! He ruins the present while worrying about the future, but weeps in the future by recalling his past! — Ali Ibn Abi Talib

When his hand came down across my bottom the first time I thought I was going to die. But the pain passed, transmuted as if my some alchemical wizardry, and for a moment I experienced a surreal satisfaction in being bent over in this way without rights or choices, past or future. In pain you are living in the present and as the pain passes there is pleasure from having endured the pain. — Chloe Thurlow

The rest of the universe is like the coin. The events of
the past appear to cause the present, but every time we pop
back into existence we are subject to a new set of probabilities.
Literally anything can happen. — Scott Adams

Two temptations that impair the value of their work inevitably beset public men who write memoirs. One is a tendency to reconstruct the past to suit the present views and feelings of the writer; the other is a natual desire to set his own part in affairs in a pleasing light. — Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey Of Fallodon

The general rule is that my life is focused on the present, and very little on the past. If anything, I'm a little bit more focused toward the future. — Nicholas Sparks

And this time as the lashes come, try to think about the pain, instead of against it, because there is not one single aspect of life, past, present, or future, that does not tear your reason from you, to think on it. So think about the pain. This pain after all has its limits. You can chart its passage through your body. It has a beginning, middle, end. Imagine if it had a color. The first cut of the lash is what, red? Red, spreading into a brilliant yellow. And this one again, red, red, no yellow, and then white, white, white, white ... Why have you incarcerated yourself in this palazzo of torture chambers, why do you not leave this place? Because you are a monster and this is a school for monsters, and if you leave here, then you will be completely, completely alone! Alone with this!
Don't weep in front of these strangers. Swallow it down. Don't weep in front of these strangers! Cry to heaven, cry to heaven, cry to heaven. — Anne Rice

Teaching involves a search for meaning in the world. Teaching is a life project, a calling, a vocation that is an organizing center of all other activities. Teaching is past and future as well as present, it is background as well as foreground, it is depth as well as surface. Teaching is pain and humor, joy and anger, dreariness and epiphany. Teaching is world building, it is architecture and design, it is purpose and moral enterprise. Teaching is a way of being in the world that breaks through the boundaries of the traditional job and in the process redefines all life and teaching itself. (p. 130) — Nancy Fichtman Dana

One of the things that happens in the world is that people try to avoid conflict. Whereas in the home, you can't. You'll end up getting divorced or becoming estranged from your kids. Keep in mind, the hardest part of any negotiation is agreeing to start it. Once you've gotten past that emotional barrier, the solutions usually present themselves. — Bruce Feiler

Life is divided into three parts: what was, what is and what shall be. Of these three periods, the present is short, the future is doubtful and the past alone is certain. — Seneca.

The time and moment of Ancient and Medieval is gone, a new change is sought from within by the lifeforce a moment that is for NOW and not holding on the Past which though Primordial is eternally in the present living for the Future. — Maitreya Rudrabhayananda

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. — Rachel Ward

This is life. You know the philosphers? The Present never stops. There's only the Present. You cheat life if you live in the Past. — Scott Turow

Life happened in the past. Life will happen in the future, but life is happening at this moment. Live in this moment. Seize this moment! — Debasish Mridha

The past cannot be redeamed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is.
To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the present and promises to be with us in the future until the end point. Only time conquers time and its burdens. There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need. — Dean Koontz

To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present. — Bo Bennett

The present is shaped by the past. — Amine A. Ayad

Posterity will say as usual: In the past things were better, the present is worse than the past. — Anton Chekhov

The imagination places the world of the future either far above us, or far below, or in a relation of metempsychosis to ourselves. We dream of traveling through the universe - but is not the universe within ourselves? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us - the mysterious way leads inwards. Eternity with its worlds - the past and future - is in ourselves or nowhere. The external world is the world of shadows - it throws its shadow into the realm of light. At present this realm certainly seems to us so dark inside, lonely, shapeless. But how entirely different it will seem to us - when this gloom is past, and the body of shadows has moved away. We will experience greater enjoyment than ever, for our spirit has been deprived. — Novalis

It is always yesterday, tomorrow, and 3 years ago today. It is always your birthday. It is always the future, the present, and the past. It is always eternity that will last. — Antonia Perdu Millie Farquoix

MOTHER TIME: The past is always with us, dear, for better or worse. It is what it is and you can't change it. All you can do is learn how to live with it in the present. — Hillary DePiano

What libraries give you is all three tenses - the past tense - the present tense in which we live and the future that we can only imagine. These places have teachers who are living and dead and we are lucky to have them. If I sit here and read Aristotle, he is speaking to me across a thousand years - more than a thousand years. That sense that I am in the company of the great greatest people who ever lived is a humbling experience but a liberating experience. — Pete Hamill

Everything we think we know, everything we think we see, everything we believe we feel, taste, smell, or hear, everything we "remember" (our pasts), everything we want to happen (our futures), everything that has ever existed or will ever exist, only exists right now. All of these things are nothing more than electric signals being passed through our brains and bodies, right now. It is all energy flowing through us right now. "The past" exists only in our minds. We are the ones who bring it into reality. We are the ones who bring it into the present. We are the ones who make it "real". — Dan Pearce

THE UNIVERSE PROCEEDS out of what it has been and into what it will be, inexorably, unstoppably, at the rate of one second per second, one year per year, forever. At right angles to its forward progress lie the past and the future. The future, that is to say, does not lie "ahead" of the present in the stream of time, but at a right angle to it: the future of any present moment can be projected as far as you like outward from it, infinitely in fact, but when the universe has proceeded further, and a new present moment has succeeded this one, the future of this one retreats with it into the what-has-been, forever outdated. It is similar but more complicated with the past. — John Crowley

In his arms I've finally found the place I've been looking for, where fear can't touch me, where memories can't reach, where the past is forgotten and the present is enough. Where the present is, in fact, all that matters. — Sarah Alderson

Your whole past hangs around you with nothing completed - because nothing has been lived really, everything somehow bypassed, partially lived, only so-so, in a lukewarm way. There has been no intensity, no passion. You have been moving like a somnambulist, a sleepwalker. So that past hangs, and the future creates fear. And between the past and the future is crushed your present, the only reality. — Rajneesh

The experience you've had may be unwanted, may amount to nothing but damage and waste, but experience has substance, is factual, authoritative, lives on in your past and affects your present, whatever you attempt to do about it. — A.S.A Harrison

Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown of Louis XIV, to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV? We scoff at M. de Vaublanc for erasing the N's from the bridge of Jena! What was it that he did? What are we doing? Bouvines belongs to us as well as Marengo. The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N's. That is our patrimony. To what purpose shall we diminish it? We must not deny our country in the past any more than in the present. Why not accept the whole of history? Why not love the whole of France?" It — Victor Hugo

The Buddha said that we should not be afraid of the past; but he did warn us not to lose ourselves in it, either. We should not feed our regret or pain over the past, and we should not get carried away by the past. We do need to study and understand the past, however, because by looking deeply into the past we learn a lot of things that can benefit the present and the future. The past is an object of our study, of our meditation, but the way to study it or meditate on it is by remaining anchored in the present moment. We — Thich Nhat Hanh

I've set the intention that all who ask to receive attunements from me receive them perfectly and instantly the moment they call them in regardless if the attunement is prepared in the past, present or future and regardless of who the recipient is. — Chris Comish

There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of the those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Mddle Eastern history is filled with minefields, not because of what actually happened in the past, but because of how people read back the present into the past. — Christopher Catherwood

I love this book! Cathy Malkasian's Percy Gloom swirls with echoes of cartoon landscapes from the past and present. You can almost hear Percy Gloom's meek, docile little voice. Her writing is so full of wit and charm that we, like the title character, walk dutifully to the edge and fall in. And like Percy, we are rewarded equally with night terrors and secret treasures. — Jeff Smith

The present is burthened too much with the past. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simmple, sel-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future. — Dean Koontz

A perception of the cosmic unity of this higher level. And a feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naive faith in causality - the notion that A in the past caused B in the present, which will cause C in the future, when actually A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by opening the doors of perception and experiencing it ... in this moment ... this supreme moment ... this Kairos. — Tom Wolfe

We mistakenly believe that who we were is who we are, thus limiting our true potential in the present, based on the limitations of our past. — Hal Elrod

How does anyone ever know anything - the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation. — Ben Fountain