Past

Quotes about the past:

Sourced

  • The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's.
    • Jean Paul, as quoted in Treasury of Thought (1872) by Maturin M. Ballou, p. 521.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 581-83.
  • Therefore Agathon rightly says: "Of this alone even God is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been."
  • The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
  • No traces left of all the busy scene,
    But that remembrances says: The things have been.
    • Samuel Boyse, The Deity.
  • But how carve way i' the life that lies before,
    If bent on groaning ever for the past?
  • The light of other days is faded,
    And all their glories past.
  • The age of chivalry is gone.
  • John Anderson, my jo, John,
    When we were first acquent,
    Your locks were like the raven,
    Your bonny brow was brent.
  • The best of prophets of the future is the past.
  • The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.
  • O, to bring back the great Homeric time,
    The simple manners and the deeds sublime:
    When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate,
    Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight.
    • Mortimer Collins, letter to the Rt. Hon. B. Disraeli, M. P. Pub. anon. 1869. "Ploughing his lonely furrow." Used by Lord Rosebery. July, 1901.
  • Listen to the Water-Mill:
    Through the live-long day
    How the clicking of its wheel
    Wears the hours away!
    Languidly the Autumn wind
    Stirs the forest leaves,
    From the field the reapers sing
    Binding up their sheaves:
    And a proverb haunts my mind
    As a spell is cast,
    "The mill cannot grind
    With the water that is past."
  • Not heaven itself upon the past has power;
    But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
    • John Dryden, Imitation of Horace, Book III. Ode XXIX, line 71.
  • Ils sont passés ces jours de fête.
    • The days of rejoicing are gone forever.
    • Jacques Du Lorens, Le Tableau Parlant.
  • Oh le bon temps où étions si malheureux.
    • Oh! the good times when we were so unhappy.
    • Alexandre Dumas, Le Chevalier d'Harmental, II. 318.
  • Un jeune homme d'un bien beau passé.
    • A young man with a very good past.
    • Heine of Alfred de Musset. Quoted by Swinburne, Miscellanies, p. 233.
  • O Death! O Change! O Time!
    Without you, O! the insufferable eyes
    Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
    These fatuous, ineffectual yesterdays.
  • Praise they that will times past, I joy to see
    My selfe now live: this age best pleaseth mee.
  • O God! Put back Thy universe and give me yesterday.
    • Henry Arthur Jones, Silver King.
  • Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
  • Enjoy the spring of love and youth,
    To some good angel leave the rest;
    For time will teach thee soon the truth,
    There are no birds in last year's nest.
  • Prisca juvent alios; ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor.
    • The good of other times let people state;
      I think it lucky I was born so late.
    • Ovid, Ars Amatoria, III. 121. Translation by Sydney Smith.
  • Weep no more, lady, weep no more,
    Thy sorrowe is in vaine,
    For violets pluckt, the sweetest showers
    Will ne'er make grow againe.
  • O there are Voices of the Past,
    Links of a broken chain,
    Wings that can bear me back to Times
    Which cannot come again;
    Yet God forbid that I should lose
    The echoes that remain!
  • In tanta inconstantia turbaque rerum nihil nisi quod preteriit certum est.
    • In the great inconstancy and crowd of events, nothing is certain except the past.
    • Seneca, De Consolatione ad Marciam, XXII.
  • The past Hours weak and gray
    With the spoil which their toil
    Raked together
    From the conquest but One could foil.
  • I need not ask thee if that hand, now calmed,
    Has any Roman soldier mauled and knuckled,
    For thou wert dead, and buried and embalmed,
    Ere Romulus and Remus had been suckled:
    Antiquity appears to have begun
    Long after that primeval race was run.
    • Horace Smith, Address to the Mummy in Belzoni's Exhibition.
  • Oh, had I but Aladdin's lamp
    Tho' only for a day,
    I'd try to find a link to bind
    The joys that pass away.
    • Charles Swain, Oh, Had I but Aladdin's Lamp.
  • Oh seize the instant time; you never will
    With waters once passed by impel the mill.
  • Many a woman has a past; but I am told she has at least a dozen, and that they all fit.
    • Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan, Act I. A Woman with a Past. Title of a Novel by Mrs. Berens. Pub. 1886.
  • Though nothing can bring back the hour
    Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.
  • For old, unhappy, far-off things,
    And battles long ago.
  • That awful independent on to-morrow!
    Whose work is done; who triumphs in the past;
    Whose yesterdays look backward with a smile
    Nor, like the Parthian, wound him as they fly.
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night II, line 322.
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Unsourced

  • "Not to know what happened before we were born is always to remain a child; to know, and blindly to adopt that knowledge as an implicit rule of life, is never to be a man."
    • Chatfield
  • "No hand can make the clock strike for me the hours that are passed."
  • "The present is only intelligible in the light of the past."
    • Trench
  • "Study the past if you would divine the future."
  • "The best of prophets of the future is the past."
  • "Many classes are always praising the by-gone time, for it is natural that the old should extol the days of their youth; the weak, the area of their strength; the sick, the season of their vigor; and the disappointed, the springtide of their hopes!"
    • C. Bingham
  • "Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns."
  • "Do not attempt to change the past, but instead, seek to make the future"
    • Gen. Teofisto Gaurano
  • "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
  • "The past always looks better than it was. It's only pleasant because it isn't here."
  • "We are tomorrow's past."
    • Mary Webb
  • "The past isn't often the picnic we remember it to have been."
    • Justin Bryan Snider
  • "One only remembers part of the past. Truth is always changing, especially when it is related to the past."
    • Derek Tangye, British author. From his autobiography, The Way to Minak (1968), Ch. XVI, p. 166.
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See also

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References

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Look up past in Wiktionary, the free dictionary
  • Klopsch, Louis, 1852-1910 (1896). Many Thoughts of Many Minds. 
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Last modified on 28 January 2013, at 12:30