150 Past Inspirational Quotes

In our fast-paced world, finding moments of inspiration can be the key to unlocking our full potential and achieving our dreams. Whether it’s overcoming daily challenges or striving for long-term goals, a few wise words can light the fire within us and guide us towards success. That’s why we've carefully curated a collection of the top 150 past inspirational quotes. These timeless pieces of wisdom, sourced from the minds of great thinkers, leaders, and visionaries, offer priceless insights and motivation. Dive into these quotes and let them fuel your journey to greatness, offering guidance, comfort, and the spark of inspiration exactly when you need it.

1. “It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down....” - Kate Morton

2. “You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.” - Chuck Palahniuk

3. “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” - Cormac McCarthy

4. “The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.” - Harry S. Truman

5. “The past is always tense, the future perfect.” - zadie smith

6. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” - T.S. Eliot

7. “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

8. “People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.” - Chuck Palahniuk

9. “What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.” - William Maxwell

10. “The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.” - Lenny Bruce

11. “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” - Napoleon Bonaparte

12. “The past is never where you think you left it.” - Katherine Anne Porter

13. “Sometimes I think I live more closely to the past than the present.” - Patricia Briggs

14. “One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.” - Oscar Wilde

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

16. “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” - Cormac McCarthy

17. “The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.” - C.S. Lewis

18. “And it is clear to Evan, now: the difference between what is and what has been done; the present and the past. He sees that what he does and who he is isn't based on the past unless he wants it to be... No. That is the past, which has been seen differently through many different eyes and has become hazy and unclear, like a pond when stirred with a stick. Only the present moment is clear and free from prejudice.” - Garth Stein

19. “Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.” - H.P. Lovecraft

20. “We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable.” - Frans Kellendonk

21. “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

22. “Withdraw, like a turtle, into a hard yet harmless shell, ornamented with beautiful memories of the past.from the book 'I Know Who You Are!” - Fatima Masood

23. “Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory” - James Stephens

24. “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

25. “Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?” - Kate Morton

26. “that there are many things that we cant understand. the past. the bad things that happened... and we become afraid. of what might happen in the future. its okay to be afraid. but we have to keep hoping and believeing... to keep hoping and trying our best to be good and do good. even when we're afraid” - Nafisa Haji

27. “If you don’t deal with the past, the past deals with you.” - Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson

28. “Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.” - Haruki Murakami

29. “Our parents' generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best.” - P.D. James

30. “I often laughed, and you often gave me a dissatisfied look, till you pressed me to unfold my past before you as if it were a roll of pictures. It was then I felt respect for you. Because you unreservedly showed me your resolution to catch something alive in my being, and to sip the warm blood running in my body, by cutting my heart. At that time, I was still living, and did not want to die. So I rejected your request, promising to satisfy you some day. Now I am going to destroy my heart myself, and pour my blood into your veins. I shall be happy if a new life can enter into your bosom, when my heart has stopped beating.” - Natsume Soseki

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

32. “The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves.” - Julio Cortazar

33. “Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.” - Wallace Stegner

34. “Let us not burthen our remembrance withA heaviness that's gone.” - William Shakespeare

35. “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” - James Baldwin

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

37. “The past is fractal premonition, infinite to the eye but nothing to be built on . . .” - Lawrence Krauser

38. “There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.” - Douglas Adams

39. “I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.” - Beryl Markham

40. “But you must stop playing among his ghosts -- it's stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He's trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It's not nice, and it's not fair.” - Patricia A. McKillip

41. “Things without all remedy should be without regard: what's done is done.” - William Shakespeare

42. “Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.Lies 2: Time is a straight line.Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...)Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.Lies 7: Reality is truth.” - Jeanette Winterson

43. “If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: 'Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, catologuing other people's books instead of writing your own? What had become of the Ram, the Bull and the Lion, the example I gave you to emulate? Where above all is the Virgin, with her shining face and curling tresses, whom I entrusted to you'- what should I say?I should have an answer ready. 'Well, it was you who let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun, and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made me.'To which he might reply: 'But you have had half a century to get over it! Half a century, half the twentieth century, that glorious epoch, that golden age that I bequeathed to you!''Has the twentieth century,' I should ask, 'done so much better than I have? When you leave this room, which I admit is dull and cheerless, and take the last bus to your home in the past, if you haven't missed it - ask yourself whether you found everything so radiant as you imagined it. Ask yourself whether it has fulfilled your hopes. You were vanquished, Colston, you were vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you hoped so much of.” - L.P. Hartley

44. “People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.” - Hugo Hamilton

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

46. “Oh, Myr," he chokes out. "I hate having to ask this of you..."He glances towards the car again, and I crouch down in the shadows, hoping it's too dark for him to see whether the window is open or closed. The woman pats his arm, cradling her hand against his elbow."You know I'd do anything for you and Hil," she says. I like her voice. It's throaty and rich."You'd do anything?" my father repeats numbly. "Even now? After -?""Even now," the woman says firmly.” - Margaret Peterson Haddix

47. “I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.” - Alan Wilson Watts

48. “I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.” - Sophia Loren

49. “If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being--ever mindful of its personal style.” - Tom Robbins

50. “The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.” - Frederick Buechner

51. “A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.” - Robert A. Heinlein

52. “To dream the future is much more better than to regret the past.But the best of all, to live in the present life with all of your power.” - Toba Beta

53. “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

54. “It's best to be ruthless with the past.” - Stephen King

55. “More than half of my life is past; I have left only the time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my virtues.” - Rousseau Jean - Jacques

56. “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

57. “The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.” - Hilary Mantel

58. “Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.” - Oscar Wilde

59. “Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!” - Harriet Beecher Stowe

60. “I was aware that we were both silently making those inevitable comparisons, putting our relationship in context. She is more this and less that. He is better or worse in these ways. It is human nature to do this--unless its your first relationship, which might be the very reason that your first relationship feels special and remains forever sacred. But the older you get, the more cynical you become, and the more complicated and convoluted the exercise is. You begin to realize that nothing is perfect, that there are trade-offs and sacrifices. The worst is when someone in your past trumps the person in the present, and you think to yourself: if I'd known this, then maybe I wouldn't have let him go.” - Emily Giffin

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

62. “What if I can't turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from.” - Wallace Stegner

63. “Do you remember those days? Back porch, sunshine, mason jars" - she paused at remembered sweetness - "we were so foolish then...thinking there was a big ol' world out there to conquer.” - Melissa Marr

64. “[The past] has a way of hanging around, demanding we understand it and weave it into ourselves so that we can go on.” - Margaret Coel

65. “There ain't a man in the world cares about a woman's past until he's thinking of her in his future.” - Dru Pagliassotti

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

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

71. “It may be possible to forget our past but our past is not going to forget us.” - Francesca Marciano

72. “Past and future is determined by what is now…right now! This is why the present is a gift; the only one that ultimately matters most.” - T.F. Hodge

73. “By living exclusively for the present, we let ourselves be hemmed in by an ocean of death. Conversely, by reviving the past, we enlarge our living space.” - amin maalouf

74. “The past is bound to be fragmentary, bound to be reconstructed, bound to be reinvented. It serves only to collect the truths of today. If our present is the child of the past, our past is the child of the present. And the future will be the harvester of our bastard offspring.” - amin maalouf

75. “Life on the run was filled with dreams, some at night during sleep, real dreams, and some when the mind was awake but drifting. Most were terrifying, the nightmares of the shadows growing bolder and larger. Others were pleasant wishes of a rosy future, free of the past. These were rare, Patrick had learned. Life on the run was life in the past. There was no closure” - John Grisham

76. “I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.” - Jodi Picoult

77. “The past embraces the futureThe future embraces the pastThey are both intertwinedLinked in all eternity” - Karen Hackel

78. “I just don't see why the past has to matter.” - Cassandra Clare

79. “Your childhood," said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.” - Gregory Maguire

80. “The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present.” - Steve Toltz

81. “The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.” - Peter Benchley

82. “Indeed, the future is signalled in the past, but time has to pass to see it. Art is the witness.BLOG post-Perpetual Beginning-November 14 2011” - Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox

83. “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

84. “We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.” - Glen Duncan

85. “No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.” - Jamaica Kincaid

86. “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” - George Orwell

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

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

89. “The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future.Cut loose the past; it is dead weight.Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.” - Stephen Baxter

90. “It's been my experience, Langford, that the past always has a way of returning. Those who don't learn, or can't remember it, are doomed to repeat it.” - Steve Berry

91. “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

92. “No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” - Gautama Buddha

93. “Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future” - Maxim Gorky

94. “To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.” - Cameron Conaway

95. “I don't think much about guys from the past. I'm glad I knew them, but there's a reason they didn't make it into my future.” - Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

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

97. “In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

98. “He walks through the house of his past, hoping he'll find the right door, hoping he'll find the key.” - Steven Herrick

99. “My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.” - William Golding

100. “A woman without a past is like a fruitcake without brandy—insipid!” - Nancy Atherton

101. “You know the saying a rolling stone gathers no moss? I'm the opposite. I've gathered too much, and when one thing happens, it brings up everything else that's ever been similar to it. I don't just feel things once and then move on. I fell them over and over again, and the only new thing is whatever precipitated the memory of the old, so it never really feels new at all. Everything just gets integrated into one big giant ball...” - Jane Devin

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

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

104. “Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.” - James Robertson

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

106. “Who knows what's for true once a time is past? There's no way to prove how something was that's gone. And if a time is gone, what does it matter? It's all rain into rivers now.” - Jo Dereske

107. “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

108. “In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.” - zadie smith

109. “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

110. “For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.” - Anna Funder

111. “Our past may shape us, but it doesn't define who we become.” - Ellen Hopkins

112. “Quella strada del passato si srotolava confusamente di fianco a noi come se la tazza della vita si fosse rovesciata e ogni cosa fosse impazzita.” - Jack Kerouac

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

114. “We always cherish and miss the time passed yet struglling for a better future but after moving to next level we feel the past was beautiful” - Salman Ahmad

115. “If I were the Devil . . . I mean, if I were the Prince of Darkness, I would of course, want to engulf the whole earth in darkness. I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree, so I should set about however necessary to take over the United States. I would begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” “Do as you please.” To the young, I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is “square”. In the ears of the young marrieds, I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be extreme in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct. And the old, I would teach to pray. I would teach them to say after me: “Our Father, which art in Washington” . . .If I were the devil, I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull an uninteresting. I’d threaten T.V. with dirtier movies and vice versa. And then, if I were the devil, I’d get organized. I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing and less work, because idle hands usually work for me. I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. And I’d tranquilize the rest with pills. If I were the devil, I would encourage schools to refine yound intellects but neglect to discipline emotions . . . let those run wild. I would designate an athiest to front for me before the highest courts in the land and I would get preachers to say “she’s right.” With flattery and promises of power, I could get the courts to rule what I construe as against God and in favor of pornography, and thus, I would evict God from the courthouse, and then from the school house, and then from the houses of Congress and then, in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion, and I would deify science because that way men would become smart enough to create super weapons but not wise enough to control them.If I were Satan, I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg, and the symbol of Christmas, a bottle. If I were the devil, I would take from those who have and I would give to those who wanted, until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. And then, my police state would force everybody back to work. Then, I could separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines, and objectors in slave camps. In other words, if I were Satan, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing.(Speech was broadcast by ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey on April 3, 1965)” - Paul Harvey

116. “You don’t rewrite it, censor it, or edit it, to suit some warped view you have of the past and your own present.” - V.T. Davy

117. “I’ve got a question for you… Are you the person who you thought you’d be by now? I know I am not. The fact is that life may not be what you thought it would be by now (If It is, I congratulate you & applaud you) You may feel stuck in a job you don’t like, not making enough money, jobless, or maybe you are in a bad relationship/marriage, or unhappy because you are out of shape…but don’t let that get you down.The key is 2 focus on what you have (Health,Fam,friends etc) instead of what you don’t have. And also in the things that you have done (Finished a Race-College/Got that Diploma/Raise a Family etc) Instead of the things you haven’t done. yetIF where you are now, it’s not where you want to be…know that where you’re going is far more important than where you are now or where you’ve been.Forgive yourself, Accept the current situation & MOVE ON, knowing that from now on you will focus your time & energy on the possibilities & opportunities that lie ahead 4 you in the near future.” - Pablo

118. “Learn from your past and shut the door behind to live in present.Our past is just like a dry rose which was once a rose with all colors of life, with sweet fragrance, with soft petal, with thorns but now it is left with only thorns which could still hurt.” - ideaswar

119. “Cette qualité de la joie n’est-elle pas le fruit le plus précieux de la civilisation qui est nôtre ? Une tyrannie totalitaire pourrait nous satisfaire, elle aussi, dans nos besoins matériels. Mais nous ne sommes pas un bétail à l’engrais. La prospérité et le confort ne sauraient suffire à nous combler. Pour nous qui fûmes élevés dans le culte du respect de l’homme, pèsent lourd les simples rencontres qui se changent parfois en fêtes merveilleuses…Respect de l’homme ! Respect de l’homme !… Là est la pierre de touche ! Quand le Naziste respecte exclusivement qui lui ressemble, il ne respecte rien que soi-même ; il refuse les contradictions créatrices, ruine tout espoir d’ascension, et fonde pour mille ans, en place d’un homme, le robot d’une termitière. L’ordre pour l’ordre châtre l’homme de son pouvoir essentiel, qui est de transformer et le monde et soi-même. La vie crée l’ordre, mais l’ordre ne crée pas la vie.Il nous semble, à nous, bien au contraire, que notre ascension n’est pas achevée, que la vérité de demain se nourrit de l’erreur d’hier, et que les contradictions à surmonter sont le terreau même de notre croissance. Nous reconnaissons comme nôtres ceux mêmes qui diffèrent de nous. Mais quelle étrange parenté ! elle se fonde sur l’avenir, non sur le passé. Sur le but, non sur l’origine. Nous sommes l’un pour l’autre des pèlerins qui, le long de chemins divers, peinons vers le même rendez-vous.Mais voici qu’aujourd’hui le respect de l’homme, condition de notre ascension, est en péril. Les craquements du monde moderne nous ont engagés dans les ténèbres. Les problèmes sont incohérents, les solutions contradictoires. La vérité d’hier est morte, celle de demain est encore à bâtir. Aucune synthèse valable n’est entrevue, et chacun d’entre nous ne détient qu’une parcelle de la vérité. Faute d’évidence qui les impose, les religions politiques font appel à la violence. Et voici qu’à nous diviser sur les méthodes, nous risquons de ne plus reconnaître que nous nous hâtons vers le même but.Le voyageur qui franchit sa montagne dans la direction d’une étoile, s’il se laisse trop absorber par ses problèmes d’escalade, risque d’oublier quelle étoile le guide. S’il n’agit plus que pour agir, il n’ira nulle part. La chaisière de cathédrale, à se préoccuper trop âprement de la location de ses chaises, risque d’oublier qu’elle sert un dieu. Ainsi, à m’enfermer dans quelque passion partisane, je risque d’oublier qu’une politique n’a de sens qu’à condition d’être au service d’une évidence spirituelle. Nous avons goûté, aux heures de miracle, une certaine qualité des relations humaines : là est pour nous la vérité.Quelle que soit l’urgence de l’action, il nous est interdit d’oublier, faute de quoi cette action demeurera stérile, la vocation qui doit la commander. Nous voulons fonder le respect de l’homme. Pourquoi nous haïrions-nous à l’intérieur d’un même camp ? Aucun d’entre nous ne détient le monopole de la pureté d’intention. Je puis combattre, au nom de ma route, telle route qu’un autre a choisie. Je puis critiquer les démarches de sa raison. Les démarches de la raison sont incertaines. Mais je dois respecter cet homme, sur le plan de l’Esprit, s’il peine vers la même étoile.Respect de l’Homme ! Respect de l’Homme !… Si le respect de l’homme est fondé dans le cœur des hommes, les hommes finiront bien par fonder en retour le système social, politique ou économique qui consacrera ce respect. Une civilisation se fonde d’abord dans la substance. Elle est d’abord, dans l’homme, désir aveugle d’une certaine chaleur. L’homme ensuite, d’erreur en erreur, trouve le chemin qui conduit au feu.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

120. “In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays.” - John Lanchester

121. “One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.” - Jorge Luis Borges

122. “We all have a past that may be worthy of some criticism".~R. Alan Woods [2012]” - R. Alan Woods

123. “How can anyone truthfully claim to love someone when they’re not prepared to share everything with that person, including their past?” - Jan-Philipp Sendker

124. “Orice i-aş spune, trecutul nu i-l pot schimba şi nici amintirile.” - Ileana Vulpescu

125. “Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled ‘the past,’ and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.” - Zelda Fitzgerald

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

127. “Once upon a time, began the story of you.Many perilous, wonderful, harrowing, brilliant, delightful, profound things happened.And yet—the most exciting twists and best turns are yet to come. And it absolutely does not matter how old or young you are.Like a bright carpet of wonders, enjoy the unrolling of your story.” - Vera Nazarian

128. “Colour outside the lines, live outside the box. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do, or not. Don’t be afraid, listen to your heart. Heaven is a state of being – of one-ness, and Hell is a state of being – lost. We simply need to live as we best define ourselves, find our own ways of being who we are in our world. There is no requirement - only freedom of choice. We should not be judged if we are doing what we think best according to our perceptions at any given time. Guilt should be discarded, moved beyond - what matters is who we choose to be in the next moment, given what we might have learned. We continually create ourselves anew. Forgiving someone is a great way to show love, and forgive yourself too for the hurt you held onto far too long. Take back the energy you have wasted on these things and reclaim your power to be your next best self. Honour the past but refresh, expand, renew, fulfill. Heaven is within us, always reachable.” - jay woodman

129. “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

130. “Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.” - John Green

131. “‎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

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

133. “This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.” - Lauren Oliver

134. “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

135. “Rather than having regrets over events in the past, or worrying whether or not the future will bring you what you need or desire, allow yourself to rest in the present, the now. Understand that all that has transpired has brought you to this moment, and in this very moment, riches that far outweigh those of the world already lie within you.” - Kristi Bowman

136. “The past will be your teacher if you learn from it; your master if you live in it.” - Steve Maraboli

137. “As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.” - Victor Hugo

138. “We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.” - Pascal Mercier

139. “Night falls fast. Today is in the past.” - John Green

140. “There is no shame in having been the woman I was. She made me the woman I am.” - Julie-Anne

141. “we can gain experience from the past, but we cant relive it. But we can hope for the future, Its always along side us, on the inside of us looking out. The past should not be allowed to evaporate but should exist only in memories.” - Sean Sullivan

142. “No human can bury their past indefinitely. It’s only a matter of time before you crack.” - K.A. Tucker

143. “Leave off sniffing the carcass of your old life-do you enjoy unending pain? There is no shame in walking away from bones. Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you.” - Robin Hobb

144. “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

145. “Why are we learning about the past, when this is History?” - Galinda Glinda

146. “Sometimes in order to appreciate your future, you must remember the past.” - Dennis E. Adonis

147. “If we let go of the past, we will never learn from our mistakes.” - Sarah van Waterschoot

148. “I am who I am because the tears of my past have watered the magnificence of my present.” - Steve Maraboli

149. “As exciting, difficult, and memorable as our past can be, there comes a time when we have to get on with living.” - Patrick Carman

150. “Living is like driving," my grandmother used to say. "You have to pick a lane." Have I chosen the right lane? It feels like this place, this moment in time, lies exactly halfway between my past and my future.” - Kathleen Flinn