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Past

bygone time – subdivision of time contrasted with present and future

The past is a term used to indicate the totality of events which occurred before a given point in time. The past is contrasted with and defined by the present and the future. The concept of the past is derived from the linear fashion in which human observers experience time, and is accessed through memory and recollection.

How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind? ~ Douglas Adams
The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action. What its great thinkers have thought and written on the deepest problems of life, shall we not hear and enjoy? ~ Felix Adler
The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores. ~ Martin Amis
We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
Once you realize you deserve a bright future, letting go of your dark past is the best choice you will ever make. ~ Roy T. Bennett
Live in the present and shape the future, do not be casting lingering looks to the distant past for the past has passed away, never again to return. ~ Subramanya Bharathi
Those who adhere to the past won't be able to cope with the future. ~ Willy Brandt
Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future. ~ Ashleigh Brilliant
You shouldn't chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. ~ Gautama Buddha
You can never plan the future by the past. ~ Edmund Burke
How we remember the past determines the shape of the future. ~ James Carroll
The past is never dead. It's not even past. ~ William Faulkner
Time is always moving on; nothing can stop it. We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future. The more compassionate you are, the more you will find inner peace. ~ Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future. ~ Robert A. Heinlein
History is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present. ~ David Hemingson
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. ~ Thomas Jefferson
Remember the past with gratitude, live the present with enthusiasm and look forward to the future with confidence. ~ Pope John Paul II
I know when I was a kid, I used to look at these pictures and listen to the songs of the Gay Nineties, and I used to say to my mother, 'Oh, I wish I had lived then; it was so gay and so wonderful.' [...] Now [the Jazz Age] seems very mysterious and wonderful to you, kids, and when you have kids, they'll say, 'Gee, Dad, those 50's, they were something.' ~ Helen Kane
My call is not to those who believe they belong to the past. My call is to those who believe in the future. ~ John F. Kennedy.
We need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future. ~ John F. Kennedy.
We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past. ~ Ken Kesey
Draw from your past, but do not let your past draw from you. ~ Joseph Mallozzi & Paul Mullie
The past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru
If we don't care about our past we can't have very much hope for our future. ~ Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
May you all go boldly into a future freed from the shackles of the past. ~ Jean-Luc Picard
To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
The past is now. ~ Kiley Rossetter & Christopher Monfette
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
~ George Santayana
When emotion brings us ghosts from the past, only logic can root us in the present. ~ Sarek
An overflowing pot must be emptied before anything new can be added. If you cling to the sorrows of the past, how can you make space for the happiness and joy of the present?
~ Sanu Sharma
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
~ H. G. Wells
Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. We must forge the future with the past.
~ Malcolm X

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations · See also · External links

A

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  • Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.
    • Martin Amis, Lecture given at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (30 January 1997).
  • One thing alone not even God can do,
    To make undone whatever hath been done.
    • Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, trans. Robert Williams (1879), book 6, chapter 2, p. 154. See also R. W. Browne's translation (1850), Book VI, Chapter II:
      Therefore Agathon rightly says: "Of this alone even God is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been".
      Same idea in John Milton, Paradise Lost, 9. 926. Pindar, Olympia. 2. 17. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, 2. 5. 10. Aristotle attributed these words to Agathon, an Athenian tragic poet who lived in the latter half of the fifth century B.C. In his column, "Today and Tomorrow", Walter Lippmann attributed the same idea to George Santayana: "He might meditate on Santayana's saying that not even God can change the past". New York Herald Tribune (June 11, 1951), p. 17. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
  • History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present – the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject. History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction between the historian and the past. As such, history can be seen as a process of evaluation whereby the past is always coloured by the intellectual fashions and philosophical concerns of the present. This shifting perspective on the past is matched by the fluid status of the past itself.
    • Dana Arnold, Reading Architectural History (2002), Ch. 1 : Reading the past : What is architectural history?

B

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  • There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.
  • Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past — which is to say, only a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l'ordre du jour — and that day is Judgement Day.
  • Once you realize you deserve a bright future, letting go of your dark past is the best choice you will ever make.
  • Benjamin describes the revolutionary moment when the past suddenly bursts into the present, as if rising from the grave to rectify the wrongs it suffered at the hands of a banally triumphant progress. Thus Benjamin’s historical materialism implies a capacity to link otherwise separate and distant moments in time through a profound empathy. The empathy takes on a revolutionary character by disrupting the regularity of quotidian temporality. Without this sort of tie to the past, no critical stance in the present is possible.
    • Russell Berman, Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 18
  • PAST, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one -- the knowledge and the dream.
  • Die Zukunft wird nicht gemeistert von denen, die am Vergangenen kleben.
    • Those who adhere to the past won't be able to cope with the future.
    • Willy Brandt, speech at the extraordinary convention of the Social Democratic Party of Germany on 18 November 1971, book source: "Reden und Interviews: Herbst 1971 bis Frühjahr 1973", Hoffmann und Campe, 1973, p. 25.
  • You shouldn't chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind.
    • Gautama Buddha, Bhaddekaratta Sutta: An Auspicious Day, MN 131, (1997) translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
  • You can never plan the future by the past.
    • Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), Volume IV, p. 55.
  • Peter Burke asks, “What is the function of social memory?” He speculates that if a lawyer were asked, “[H]e or she might well discuss the importance of custom and precedent, the justification or legitimation of actions in the present with reference to the past.”
    • Peter Burke History as Social Memory” in Memory History, Culture and the Mind, ed. Thomas Butler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 105. as quoted on Footnote 13, p.4

C

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  • Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ. Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.
  • We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward cross the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

D

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  • We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible. There have been war, plague, scandal, and treason, and there is no way of our preventing their having taken place; the executioner became an executioner and the victim underwent his fate as a victim without us; all that we can do is to reveal it, to integrate it into the human heritage, to raise it to the dignity of the aesthetic existence which bears within itself its finality; but first this history had to occur: it occurred as scandal, revolt, crime, or sacrifice, and we were able to try to save it only because it first offered us a form.
  • One does not love the past in its living truth if he insists on preserving its hardened and mummified forms. The past is an appeal; it is an appeal toward the future which sometimes can save it only by destroying it. Even though this destruction may be a sacrifice, it would be a lie to deny it: since man wants there to be being, he can not renounce any form of being without regret. But a genuine ethics does not teach us either to sacrifice it or deny it: we must assume it.
  • 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 (1685), Book III, Ode 29 line 69-72.
  • It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it.

E

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  • Historians are really great at predicting the past. But the future is for prophets, and the track records of most prophets is dismal.

F

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  • The past is never dead. It's not even past.

G

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  • We often refer to space as the final frontier. But the older I get, the more I come to believe that the true final frontier is time. In command, as in life, what we do in crisis often weighs upon us less heavily than what we wish we had done, what could have been. Time offers many opportunities, but it rarely offers second chances. And as steps forward go I would like to acknowledge your classmate the first fully Romulan cadet at Starfleet Academy: Elnor. May you all go boldly into a future freed from the shackles of the past.
  • Time is always moving on; nothing can stop it. We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future. The more compassionate you are, the more you will find inner peace.

H

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  • I am wading in the ruins of was.
    • Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (2014), "Harriet Burden: Notebook O". London: Sceptre, 2014, p. 229.

J

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  • I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!
  • At the beginning of the new millennium, and at the close of the Great Jubilee during which we celebrated the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus and a new stage of the Church's journey begins, our hearts ring out with the words of Jesus when one day, after speaking to the crowds from Simon's boat, he invited the Apostle to "put out into the deep" for a catch: "Duc in altum" (Lk 5:4). Peter and his first companions trusted Christ's words, and cast the nets. "When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish" (Lk 5:6). Duc in altum! These words ring out for us today, and they invite us to remember the past with gratitude, to live the present with enthusiasm and to look forward to the future with confidence: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever" (Heb 13:8).
    • Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Novo Millenio Ineunte of His Holiness John Paul II to the Bishop Clergy and Lay Faithful at the close of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 (6 January 2001). Archived from the original on April 16, 2022.

K

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  • While law responds to historical change, it also makes history. Law writes the past, not just its own past, but the past for those over whom law seeks to exercise its dominion. Law constructs a history that it wants to present as authoritative, when, as Laura Kalman argues, no historian “considers the past authoritative.” And law uses history to tell us who we are.
    • Laura Kalman, “Strange Career”, 180; as quoted in Thomas R. Kearns (August 2002). History, Memory, and the Law. University of Michigan Press. p.3
  • I know when I was a kid, I used to look at these pictures and listen to the songs of the Gay Nineties, and I used to say to my mother, 'Oh, I wish I had lived then; it was so gay and so wonderful.' [...] Now [the Jazz Age] seems very mysterious and wonderful to you, kids, and when you have kids, they'll say, 'Gee, Dad, those 50's, they were something.' [...] I really think it goes in cycles. When your kids come in and say 'Gee, Dad, I wish we had done that,' and so on and so forth, it's the same thing. I don't think it's changed a great deal.
  • There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.
  • [A]t the crossroads of our history, we need to turn our backs on the past.
    • F. W. de Klerk, speech to the Congress of the National Party of Natal, Durban (25 September 1992)
  • If we dwell on real or imagined sins of the past, we shall never be able to find one another in the present, nor shall we be able to work together on building the future.

L

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  • Not to the present is our hour confined,
    The great and shadowy future is assigned
    To be the glorious empire of the mind.

    The past was once the future, and it wrought
    In the high presence of on-looking thought ;
    All that we have, was by its efforts brought.

    To-day creates to-morrow, and the tree
    Of good or ill grows in past hours, what we
    Make for the future — certain is to be.
  • We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding. We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves. We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about — survival and growth.

M

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  • There's no need to reminisce about the past; obviously because that shit did not last.

N

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  • The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future? [...] Nevertheless the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now.

O

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P

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  • 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.

R

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  • The forensic historian . . . searches the past for material applicable to a current issue. The purpose of the advocate . . . is to use the past for the elucidation of the present, to solve some contemporary problem or, most often, to carry an argument. It is the past put in the service of winning the case at bar.
    • John Philip Reid, “The Jurisprude of Liberty: The Ancient Constitution in the Legal Histiography of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, in “the Roots of Liberty: Magna Carta, Ancient Constitutions, and the Anglo-American Tradition of Rule of Law”, ed. Ellis Sandox (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 167; as quoted by Thomas R. Kearns (August 2002). History, Memory, and the Law. University of Michigan Press. p.3
  • To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.
  • Move backward to go forward. Shatter to mend. The past is now.

S

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  • Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.
  • An overflowing pot must be emptied before anything new can be added. If you cling to the sorrows of the past, how can you make space for the happiness and joy of the present?
  • How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

T

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  • For the past was once the future, and the present, but the future is not yet the past, but has the whole of its essence in existing in some after time.
    • Thomas Taylor, Proclus. The Theology of Plato Vol II, 1816.
  • I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (1997)

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  • Even if the voice [in your head] is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. p. 17
  • To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you? p. 19
  • The more you are focused on time - past and future - the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. p. 36
  • The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions. p. 36
  • Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace - and you do so now. p. 36
  • Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence. p. 42
  • The past cannot survive in your presence [in the now]. p. 61
  • Enlightenment consciously chosen means to relinquish your attachment to past and future and to make the Now the main focus of your life. p. 141

W

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  • The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

X

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  • Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.
    • Malcolm X, Speech at Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (28 June 1964), as quoted in By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter (1970).

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 581-83.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past.
    • Ken Kesey, As quoted by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) Ch. 11.
  • 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.
  • There’s a resistance to the idea that things can be learned from the past, but the past is a kind of closet full of human beings who have lots to say; the door should be opened once in a while.
  • Jill Lepore The Secret History of Wonder Woman [3]
  • 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 the Younger, 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

See also

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References

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  • Klopsch, Louis, 1852-1910 (1896). Many Thoughts of Many Minds. 
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