Times Past Quotes

• Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

  John F. Kennedy

  Inspirational, Life, Change

  Kennedy, John F. (1964). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963”, p.517, Best Books on

  585 Copy quote

  Show source
• 

  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

  George Santayana

  Past, Infancy Is, History

  "The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress", Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense by George Santayana, 1905-1906.

  150 Copy quote

  Show source

• Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

  H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  "P.S. I Love You: When Mom Wrote, She Always Saved the Best for Last". Book by H. Jackson Brown, Jr., March 1, 1991.

  167 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Gautama Buddha

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  50 Copy quote

• Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.

  James W. Loewen

  Past, Infancy Is, History

  James W. Loewen (2013). “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong”, p.16, The New Press

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.

  Robert Kiyosaki

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

  Twitter post from Jan 30, 2017

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• Concentrate the mind on the present moment.

  Gautama Buddha

  Life, Buddhist, Buddhism

  35 Copy quote

• Time past cannot be stopped, saved, or regained. But a photograph allows you to borrow it.

  Douglas McCulloh

  Past, Photograph, Saved

  4 Copy quote

• I have been searching for time past all my life.

  Jeanloup Sieff

  Past, Has Beens

  9 Copy quote

• Prudence is a presumption of the future, contracted from the experience of time past.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Past, Prudence, Presumption

  Thomas Hobbes (2013). “Leviathan”, p.18, Simon and Schuster

  38 Copy quote

  Show source

• Give up identification with this mass of flesh as well as with what thinks it a mass. Both are intellectual imaginations. Recognise your true self as undifferentiated awareness, unaffected by time, past, present or future, and enter Peace.

  Adi Shankara

  Giving Up, Thinking, Past

  320 Copy quote

• Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.

  T. S. Eliot

  Past, Littles, Consciousness

  1935 Four Quartets,'Burnt Norton', pt.2.

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• Praise they that will times past, I joy to see My selfe now live: this age best pleaseth mee.

  Robert Herrick

  Past, Joy, Age

  'The Present Time Best Pleaseth'

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• In times past...it was my habit to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed it off. Man's only right to land is his might over it. If his neighbor is mightier than he and takes the land from him, then the land is his neighbor's, until the latter is dispossessed by one mightier still.

  Benjamin Tucker

  Past, Men, Long Ago

  14 Copy quote

• The concept of active cooperation has taken the place of opposition to the new form of government and of dreamy resignation entranced with the beauty of times past.

  Gustav Stresemann

  Beauty, Taken, Past

  8 Copy quote

• The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Character, Past, News

  5 Copy quote

• Again I entered my smithy to work and forge something from the noble material of time past.

  Jean Froissart

  Past, Noble, Materials

  8 Copy quote

• time past is not time gone, it is time accumulated with the host resembling the character in the fairytale who was joined along the route by more and more characters none of whom could be separated from one another or from the host, with some stuck so fast that their presence caused physical pain.

  Janet Frame

  Pain, Character, Past

  Janet Frame (1985). “To the is-land: an autobiography”, George Braziller

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Saviour who flitted before the patriarchs through the fog of the old dispensation, and who spake in time past to the fathers by the prophets, articulate but unseen, is the same Saviour who, on the open heights of the Gospel, and in the abundant daylight of this New Testament, speaks to us. Still all along it is the same Jesus, and that Bible is from beginning to end all of it, the word of Christ.

  John Milton

  Bible, Jesus, Father

  12 Copy quote

• Time past, even God is deprived of the power of recalling.

  Aristotle

  Past, Deprived

  7 Copy quote

• Too often in time past, religion has brought forth criminal and shameful actions... How many evils has religion caused?

  Lucretius

  Past, Evil, Atheism

  34 Copy quote

• It takes more to make one sage today than it did to make the seven of Greece. And you need more resources to deal with a single person these days than with an entire nation in times past.

  Baltasar Gracian

  Art, Philosophy, Past

  "Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia". Book by Baltasar Gracián, § 1, 1647.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• When one becomes for an instant one's former self, that is to say different from what one has been for some time past, one's sensibility, being no longer dulled by habit, receives from the slightest stimulus vivid impressions which make everything that has preceded them fade into insignificance, impressions to which, because of their intensity, we attach ourselves with the momentary enthusiasm of a drunkard.

  Marcel Proust

  Past, Self, Different

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.537, Modern Library

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• May it not be asked of every intelligent friend to the liberties of his country, whether the power exercised in such an act as this ought not to produce great and universal alarm? Whether a rigid execution of such an act, in time past, would not have repressed that information and communication among the people which is indispensable to the just exercise of their electoral rights? And whether such an act, if made perpetual, and enforced with rigor, would not, in time to come, either destroy our free system of government, or prepare a convulsion that might prove equally fatal to it?

  James Madison

  Country, Communication, Exercise

  James Madison (1836). “The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution: As Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia in 1787. Together with the Journal of the Federal Convention, Luther Martin's Letter, Yates's Minutes, Congressional Opinions, Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of '98-'99, and Other Illustrations of the Constitution”, p.574

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is interesting sometimes to stop and think and wonder what the place you are currently at used to be like in times past, who walked there, who worked there and what the walls have seen.

  Patrick Geddes

  Wall, Past, Thinking

  39 Copy quote