110 Timeless Quotes To Inspire

In a world that constantly evolves and shifts, certain words possess the incredible power to transcend time and remain eternally relevant. Whether whispered in moments of solitude or shared among friends, timeless quotes have a unique way of touching our souls and igniting sparks of inspiration. They serve as reminders of universal truths, offering wisdom, courage, and comfort when we need it most. In this collection, we invite you on a journey through 110 of the most profound and enduring quotes that continue to inspire generations. Let these words of wisdom uplift your spirit and guide you through life's ever-changing landscape.

1. “When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

2. “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 up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.” - Chuck Palahniuk

3. “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” - Mother Theresa

4. “The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.” - Émile Zola

5. “We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.” - Alfred North Whitehead

6. “After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?” - Amy Tan

7. “You cannot know where your people are going if you don't know where your people have been.” - Forrest Carter

8. “No man is rich enough to buy back his past.” - Oscar Wilde

9. “It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that "past" which "ought not to be stirred up.” - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

10. “because the past was always around her and might return at any time. It prowled the world searching for her, and she knew it was growing angrier at every passing day.” - Nicholas Sparks

11. “Sooner or later we've all got to let go of our past.” - Dan Brown

12. “(M)uch as we might imagine we can leave the past behind, it has a nasty way of pressing its hoary old face against the window just as we were sitting down to the feast.” - Valerie Martin

13. “Dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss and now too distant ever to be recaptured!...What sort of arrows would be able to transfix such birds?” - Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

14. “A medicine cat has no time for doubt. Put your energy into today and stop worrying about the past.” - Erin Hunter

15. “When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable” - Martin Amis

16. “I didn't mean I'd seen everything, John Grady said.I know you didn't.I just meant I'd seen some things I'd as soon not of.I know it. There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I dont know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back. Yessir.” - Cormac McCarthy

17. “But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until — later of sooner — perhaps — no, not perhaps — quite certainly: it will come.” - Christopher Isherwood

18. “Study the past if you would define the future.” - Confucius

19. “My past is everything I failed to be.” - Fernando Pessoa

20. “Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

21. “Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.” - André Breton

22. “The halcyon days of childhood, a time when everything lay open before him, when the most minor episodes could be construed as events and every chance encounter … gave rise to fresh insights.” - Ivan Klíma

23. “Fair as the moon and joyful as the light;Tot wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;Not as she is, but as she fills his dreams.” - Christina Rossetti

24. “The past beats inside me like a second heart.” - John Banville

25. “All sins are forgiven once you start making a lot of money.” - Rupaul

26. “Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

27. “The past that Southerners are forever talking about is not a dead past--it is a chapter from the legend that our kinfolks have told us, it is a living past, living for a reason. The past is a part of the present, it is a comfort, a guide, a lesson.” - Ben Robertson

28. “Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.” - W.H. Auden

29. “Learn from the past, but don’t live in the past.” - Steve Maraboli

30. “I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.What kind of letter? my grandmother asked.I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.You want a letter from me? she asked.I told her yes.Oh, God bless you, she said.The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own. Listen to me.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

31. “When I moved, I unearthed the diaries I kept for ten years. I sat and went through them and they were a worthless burden to own. People will say it's tragic I threw them out, but I know it isn't.” - Bill Callahan

32. “The Old Days, the Lost Days -- in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs.” - Beryl Markham

33. “...всё мертвое, всё прошлое, всё, что больше не встретится в жизни нашей, - не возбуждает злости.Егор Иваныч Молотов- Н.Г. Помяловский "Мещанское счастье” - Н.Г. Помяловский

34. “Smartass Disciple: Master, I want to be the better me by forgetting my past.Master of Stupidity: If you just forget it, how would you measure you're better?” - Toba Beta

35. “I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.” - Marilynne Robinson

36. “The great times were never as great as they seem in the rearview mirror.” - Pat Benatar

37. “Sometimes in order to be happy in the present moment you have to be willing to give up all hope for a better past.” - Robert Holden

38. “What is the past but what we choose to remember?” - Amy Tan

39. “Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.” - Haruki Murakami

40. “The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.” - Audrey Niffenegger

41. “My past is trying to catch up to me and I must continue run from it. It's the only way I can live.” - Nicole Sobon

42. “You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.” - Ann Brashares

43. “We’re so used to just glancing at the environment through the eyes of the past that we’re frequently not certain if we are in fact paying attention or if we merely think that we’re paying attention. Dynamic meditation in everyday existence involves the act of truthfully seeing.Many of us have changed some aspect of our appearance only to have this go unnoticed by friends. Perhaps you’ve shaved off a mustache, added a tattoo, or altered your hairstyle, but your acquaintances failed to initially notice. In such a case, your friends were looking at their environment through the eyes of the past instead of actually seeing what was taking place in the present.” - H.E. Davey

44. “Se Souvenir du passe, et qu'il ya un avenir: Remember the past, and that there is a future.” - Deborah Harkness

45. “My past has not defined me, destroyed me, deterred me, or defeated me; it has only strengthened me.” - Steve Maraboli

46. “Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.” - Sarah Dessen

47. “To forget the past so easily seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever increasing collection of past selves- those dear, dead gentlemen who one after the other have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on the torch of my life and personal identity before creeping away silently and modestly to rest.” - W.N.P. Barbellion

48. “After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?” - Umberto Eco

49. “If you have a past with which you feel dissatisfied, then forget it, now. Imagine a new story for your life and believe in it. Focus only on the moments when you achieved what you desired, and that strength will help you to get what you want.” - Paulo Coelho

50. “Neither mine nor other people's prospects seem particularly pleasing just at the moment, and I have fantasies of going to Iceland, never to return. As it is, I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.” - Edward Gorey

51. “I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.” - Alan Moore

52. “Фейерверк погас, зачем рыться в золе?” - Эрих Мария Ремарк

53. “‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.” - Salman Rushdie

54. “Od onog ondašnjeg čovjeka ja sam se, i to upravo zbog onog doživljaja, potpuno odvojio, promatram ga sa strane, sasvim mirno i hladno, i mogu ga opisati kao prijatelja o kojem znam mnogo i sve ono što je bitno, ali ja uopće više nisam taj čovjek. Mogao bih pričati o njemu, prekoravati ga ili ga osuđivati a da uopće ne osjetim da je on jednom bio sastavni dio mene.” - Stefan Zweig

55. “The past is made out of facts... I guess the future is just hope.” - Isaac Marion

56. “The time has come to lay that baggage down and leave behind all the struggling and striving. You can be set free as you journey forward into a balanced healthy and rewarding future.” - Sue Augustine

57. “Os amigos do passado não serão mais que ténues recordações que não deixará interferir na sua ascensão. Ele já é meu.” - Susana Almeida

58. “So, yes, I will marry you. Someday. If you'll have me," he said modestly."Of course I will, you idiot," I said with a shriek, and threw myself into his arms.” - Eilis O'Neal

59. “Ideas define us, our past, our present, and most importantly, our future.” - P.W. Cross

60. “We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,The path of its departure still is free.Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;Nought may endure but Mutability!” - Percy Bysshe Shelley

61. “Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.” - Toni Morrison

62. “The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it.” - Cara Black

63. “Forgiveness is the one gift you don't give to others. Rather, it is the gift you give yourself, so you can finally be free.” - Shannon Alder

64. “Nothing is but what is now” - Ron Rash

65. “Every relationship must have a starting point so that past errors may remain in the past.” - Mary Lydon Simonsen

66. “I mean, I don't know much about the Civil War, but whenever I think of that time—I mean, ever since Gone With the Wind I've had these fantasies about those generals, those gorgeous young Southern generals with their tawny mustaches and beards, and hair in ringlets, on horseback. And those beautiful girls in crinoline and pantalettes. You would never know that they ever fucked, from all you're able to read." She paused and squeezed my hand. "I mean, doesn't it just do something to you to think of one of those ravishing girls with that crinoline all in a fabulous tangle, and one of those gorgeous young officers—I mean, both of them fucking like crazy?""Oh yes," I said with a shiver, "oh yes, it does. It enlarges one's sense of history.” - William Styron

67. “In the past, I always used to be looking for answers. Today, I know there are only questions. So I just live.” - Sarah Brightman

68. “Those who have hurt you in the past cannot continue to hurt you now unless you hold on to the pain through resentment.” - Rick Warren

69. “I stole their future from them; I can only being to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.” - Orson Scott Card

70. “You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.” - Louis-Ferdinand Celine

71. “Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson - that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we'd never be able to choose our own destiny.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

72. “A ghost from her past, part of a world to which she no longer belonged but had never stopped missing.” - Catherine Anderson

73. “Into my heart an air that killsFrom yon far country blows:What are those blue remembered hills,What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,I see it shining plain,The happy highways where I wentAnd cannot come again.” - A.E. Housman

74. “If it’s over, then don’t let the past screw up the rest of your life.” - Nicholas Sparks

75. “Wir alle, ob schuldig oder nicht, ob alt oder jung, müssen die Vergangenheit annehmen. Wir alle sind von ihren Folgen betroffen und für sie in Haftung genommen. [...] Es geht nicht darum, Vergangenheit zu bewältigen. Das kann man gar nicht. Sie läßt sich ja nicht nachträglich ändern oder ungeschehen machen. Wer aber vor der Vergangenheit die Augen verschließt, wird blind für die Gegenwart. Wer sich der Unmenschlichkeit nicht erinnern will, der wird wieder anfällig für neue Ansteckungsgefahren."[Ansprache am 8. Mai 1985 in der Gedenkstunde im Plenarsaal des Deutschen Bundestages]” - Richard von Weizsäcker

76. “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.” - George Santayana

77. “He took the last seat, as usual, a subtle reminder of what he was and what he had become.” - Faraaz Kazi

78. “When the Lord disconnects you from your past, don't try to hook up with it again.” - Anita R. Sneed-Carter

79. “Stay More' is synonymous with 'Status Quo' in fact, there are people who believe, or who like to believe, that the name of the town was intended as an entreaty, beseeching the past to remain present.” - Donald Harington

80. “He uses our past to positively affect our present and secure our future.” - Evinda Lepins

81. “But the past is long, and the future is short.” - Karen Thompson Walker

82. “I’m not mad. I already told you that. We all have mistakes in our past...and our future. It’s a fact of life.” - Shannon A Thompson

83. “But she knew that no matter what beauty lay behind, it must remain there. No one could go forward with a load of aching memories.” - Margaret Mitchell

84. “There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can’t, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.” - Terry Pratchett

85. “Some people read palms to tell your future, but I read hands to tell your past. Each scar makes a story worth telling. Each callused palm, each cracked knuckle is a missed punch or years in a factory.” - Sarah Kay

86. “Regret is counterproductive. It's looking back on a past that you can't change. Questioning things as they occur can prevent regret in the future.” - Colleen Hoover

87. “Look back on Time, with kindly eyes -He doubtless did his best -How softly sinks that trembling sunIn Human Nature's West -” - Emily Dickinson

88. “Everyone has a past, but that's just it--it's in the past. You can learn from it, but you can't change it.” - Nicholas Sparks

89. “My past has shaped me, that's true of anyone.” - R.K. Lilley

90. “Fiecare trăim istoria după mintea noastră, deci o percepem diferit.” - Ileana Vulpescu

91. “„Tik išgėręs žmogus su malonumu gali prisiminti ką nors nemalonaus iš savo gyvenimo.” - Sigitas Parulskis

92. “Every choice is a loss. The past is not where you left it.” - Ruth Padel

93. “I wanted the past to go away, I wantedto leave it, like another country; I wantedmy life to close, and openlike a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the songwhere it fallsdown over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;I wantedto hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,whoever I was, I wasalivefor a little while.” - Mary Oliver

94. “There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.” - Angela Carter

95. “The Future is as avoidable as the past is alterable, for the latter is, after all, a consequence of the former: A combination of choice and fate.” - K.C. King

96. “‎W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is--and always will be--ourselves.” - Ian Mortimer

97. “The future is only the past again, entered through another gate.” - Pinero Arthur Wing

98. “Never forget the pastTo lead the future best” - Senthil babu

99. “The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.” - George Orwell

100. “She always used to say that the past is a relentless parasite in its quest, feeding off of the senses, looking for anything that will trigger a memory–forever there to complicate the present, forever there to remind us that it will always be a piece of us. I never had a clue as to what she meant, until now.” - Laura Miller, Butterfly Weeds

101. “It has been said, people drawn to law enforcement have a sixth sense, an ability to see what others do not. He prayed he was wrong. His sixth sense said there was much more than a broken heart in Claire's past.” - Aleatha Romig

102. “In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.” - Wade Davis

103. “Let today be the day you finally release yourself from the imprisonment of past grudges and anger. Simplify your life. Let go of the poisonous past and live the abundantly beautiful present... today.” - Steve Maraboli

104. “Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.” - Julian Barnes

105. “You’re just another story I can’t tell anymore.” - pleasefindthis

106. “Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it'd really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.” - Raymond Carver

107. “We had our thing. It is a really good memory but now we're older. Things change.” - Abbi Glines

108. “Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.” - Kate Atkinson

109. “Let your strength from the pastprovide proof of your abilities to . . .conquer the difficulties of the present.” - John-Talmage Mathis

110. “My love for you spans over the lines of my past, present, and future. You are what I love remembering, what I love experiencing, and what I love looking forward to.” - Steve Maraboli