34 Past Quotes

Sometimes, the best way to understand our present and shape our future is by reflecting on the wisdom of the past. Throughout history, countless individuals have shared their thoughts, experiences, and wisdom that still resonate with us today. In this collection, we've gathered 34 of the most insightful and profound quotes about the past, offering perspectives that can inspire, comfort, and challenge us. Whether you're seeking motivation, solace, or a moment of reflection, these timeless quotes are sure to leave an impact.

1. “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

2. “No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all.” - Haruki Murakami

3. “When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.” - Margaret Atwood

4. “Live out of your imagination, not your history.” - Stephen Covey

5. “It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).” - Lauro Martines

6. “The past is for learning from and letting go. You can't revisit it. It vanishes.” - Adele Parks

7. “The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.” - Rose Macaulay

8. “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” - Chuck Palahniuk

9. “Looking at the past is like lolling in a rocking chair. It is so relaxing and you can rock back and forth on the porch, and never go forward. ” - Martha Graham

10. “We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.” - Carl Lotus Becker

11. “When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.” - Margaret Atwood

12. “It baffles me that people think that obliterating the past will save them from its consequences, as if throwing away the empty cake plate would help you lose weight.” - Timothy B. Tyson

13. “The nostalgia of a moment's love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present.” - Mike Norton

14. “The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.” - Jamaica Kincaid

15. “It’s important not to be embarrassed by your past. The contradictions are part of what we are.” - Richey Edwards

16. “...before you, life was desolate - the past hardly worth remembering - and now, each moment a keepsake I can't throw away ...” - John Geddes

17. “The past is set down in a thousand thousand indelible scrolls. But the future is a blank parchment forever in wait of a present.” - Andrew Levkoff

18. “It is we who move through time, not the reverse. When we walk beyond any one of life’s instants, it becomes nothing more than a receding milestone. We can look back, but we cannot retrace our steps. The past remains stationary, while we are doomed to move ever onwards. To do otherwise is against nature.” - Andrew Levkoff

19. “That's the past for you. Not only does it come back at the most unexpected, and inconvenient, times but it's set in stone.” - Jeffery Deaver

20. “...how time packs new years over the old ones but how those old years are still in there, like the earliest, tightest rings centering a tree, the most hidden, enclosed in darkness and shielded from weather. But then a saw screams in and the tree topples and the circles are stricken by the sun and the sap glistens and the stump is laid open for the world to see.” - Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter Crooked Letter

21. “He was the same as everyone else: he carried his past inside him. There was no escape from it. No matter how hard you push it down, the truth always comes to the surface.” - Louise Douglas

22. “History can only hurt us if we let it.” - Louise Douglas

23. “I thought about how the past can become so small. An entire day, 24 separate, heavy hours, becomes the size of a tiny brown leaf falling from a tree. Before you know it, a whole year is just a pile of dead leaves on the ground. The year or so I’d spent in love with Chad was starting to feel so long ago, swept away by the wind. I knew that this year would soon feel far away too.” - Kimberly Novosel

24. “History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.” - Heather Anastasiu

25. “Sometimes it's more painful to draw to mind the good times” - Amy Molloy

26. “Well, he's history. You're free to meet the man of your dreams now.” - Lucy Robinson

27. “when you shoot for the stars, you can't ever look back.” - Brittany Perloff

28. “I didn't know the demonsthat walked across your memory.They came from the dustwhen you were at peacein your grave.” - Susie Clevenger

29. “I now know how your angercame from skeletonsthat rattled in your heartand you couldn't escape them.” - Susie Clevenger

30. “Sometimes the past can vanish.” - Barbara Kingsolver

31. “It is not good for the spirits to dwell on that which cannot be altered.” - Amanda Quick

32. “There are a lot of them, all around the wsorld, all built a lifetime ago, during the long and spectacular blaze of American military power and self-confidence, when there was nothing we couldn't or wouldn't do. I was a product of that era, but not a part of it. I was nostalgic for something I had never experienced.” - Lee Child

33. “Every relationship that has hit a crossroads has asked, “What is it that you want from me?” - Shannon L. Alder

34. “Most of us will. We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead: we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us--who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed.But what about those who plant such clues, for us to stumble on? Why do they bother? Egotism? Pity? Revenge? A simple claim to existence, like scribbling your initials on a washroom wall? The combination of presence and anonymity--confession without penance, truth without consequences--it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another.Those who leave such evidence can scarcely complain if strangers come along afterwards and poke their noses into every single thing that would once have been none of their business. And not only strangers: lovers, friends, relations. We're voyeurs, all of us. Why should we assume that anything in the past is ours for the taking, simply because we've found it? We're all grave robbers, once we open the doors locked by others.But only locked. The rooms and their contents have been left intact. If those leaving them had wanted oblivion, there was always fire.” - Margaret Atwood