91 Memorable Quotes From History

In a world brimming with fleeting moments, certain words have the power to echo through the ages, etching themselves into the annals of history. These memorable quotes offer more than just a snapshot of the past; they encapsulate the wisdom, courage, and profound insights that have shaped our collective human experience. Whether uttered by visionary leaders, renowned thinkers, or unsung heroes, these quotations transcend time, offering inspiration and reflection to generations. Join us as we delve into a curated collection of the top 91 memorable quotes from history, each one a testament to the enduring power of eloquence and thought.

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. “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

3. “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.” - Bill Keane

4. “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” - Søren Kierkegaard

5. “One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.” - Golda Meir

6. “Always choose the future over the past. What do we do now?” - Brian Tracy

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

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

9. “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” - Albert Einstein

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

11. “There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.” - Eugene O'Neill

12. “With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.” - Haruki Murakami

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

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

15. “Certainly the heart has always something to tell about the future to those who listen to it. But what does the heart know? Scarce a little of what has already happened. ” - Alessandro Manzoni

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

17. “Tell me your past, my beloved, for a man is his past, and is to be known by it.” - James Stephens

18. “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

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

20. “I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.” - Raymond Carver

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

22. “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

23. “The distance to the corner shops of childhood becomes unfathomable, immeasurable; the candy bars have changed. And change has changed.” - Ilse Aichinger

24. “All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.” - J.G. Ballard

25. “People long to go backward in their imagination as well as forward. We don't wish simply to exist forever in some future; we wish to have existed in some distant past.” - Gloria Whelan

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

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

28. “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

29. “The truth is not so important as the leaving of it behind.” - Clare Francis

30. “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

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

32. “It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.” - J. Krishnamurti

33. “One thing I learned in here is the past is for learning. It's not for punishing others or yourself. It's not for dwelling on and getting angry about things you can't change. It's for learning how to do better in the rest of your life. And being grateful you get another chance to try and do better.” - Nicole Green

34. “Aku berusaha sebisa mungkin hidup di masa kini tanpa masa lalu yang menghilang atau masa depan yang menjelang.” - Stephenie Meyer

35. “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

36. “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

37. “And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind” - Jacques Roubaud

38. “The past can't hurt you anymore, not unless you let it.” - Alan Moore

39. “...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

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

41. “I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,whoever I was, I wasalive for a little while.” - Mary Oliver

42. “As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply: 'Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me.” - Kurt Vonnegut

43. “Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?” - Thomas Mann

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “Dear God Please take away my pain and despair of yesterday and any unpleasant memories and replace them with Your glorious promise of new hope. Show me a fresh HS-inspired way of relating to negative things that have happened. I ask You for the mind of Christ so I can discern Your voice from the voice of my past. I pray that former rejection and deep hurts will not color what I see and hear now. Help me to see all the choices I have ahead of me that can alter the direction of my life. I ask You to empower me to let go of the painful events and heartaches that would keep me bound. Thank You for Your forgiveness that You have offered to me at such a great price. Pour it into my heart so I can relinquish bitterness hurts and disappointments that have no place in my life. Please set me free to forgive those who have sinned against me and caused me pain and also myself. Open my heart to receive Your complete forgiveness and amazing grace. You have promised to bind up my wounds Psa 147:3 and restore my soul Psa 23:3 . Help me to relinquish my past surrender to You my present and move to the future You have prepared for me. I ask You to come into my heart and make me who You would have me to be so that I might do Your will here on earth. I thank You Lord for all that’s happened in my past and for all I have become through those experiences. I pray You will begin to gloriously renew my present.” - Sue Augustine

49. “There are no lessons to be learned from the past. This is the first thing I learned from it. There is nothing back then that there isn't here now. There is nothing here now - nothing that matters - that wasn't back then. What matters. Are you a good person? Do you have any love in your heart? What would you do in a given circumstance? It all comes down to something like that.” - Tom Lichtenberg

50. “There is only now. And look! How rich we are in it.” - Vanna Bonta

51. “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

52. “The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.” - Sebastian Faulks

53. “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

54. “The ability to withstand the flinch comes with the knowledge that the future will be better than the past.” - Julien Smith

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

56. “Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance.” - Paul Auster

57. “Whoever said that the past isn't dead had it backward. It's the future that's already dead, already played out.” - Gayle Forman

58. “Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?” - Roger Zelazny

59. “Everything that is past is either a learning experience to grow on, a beautiful memory to reflect on, or a motivating factor to act upon.” - Denis Waitley

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

61. “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

62. “How did it make you feel?” - Irvine Welsh

63. “If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.” - Blaise Pascal

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

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

66. “It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced – and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.” - Carol Shields

67. “I begin to realize that my memory is a great catacomb, and that below my actual standing-ground there is layer after layer of historical ashes. Is the life of mind something like that of great trees of immemorial growth? Is the living layer of consciousness super-imposed upon hundreds of dead layers? Dead? No doubt this is too much to say, but still, when memory is slack the past becomes almost as though it had never been. To remember that we did know once is not a sign of possession but a sign of loss; it is like the number of an engraving which is no longer on its nail, the title of a volume no longer to be found on its shelf. My mind is the empty frame of a thousand vanished images.” - Henri Frédéric Amiel

68. “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

69. “Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.” - Vincent Van Gogh

70. “The past is not a place I like to visit. This project is forcing me to go there, to tidy up my thoughts. I'm not normally a navel-gazer. I've always thought you find yourself in other people. I'm visiting here. I don't want to set up house.” - Bono

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

72. “The past is only making you to spill tears, tears of joy or tears pain. But anyway they are making you sad, for the things you had and will never have again.” - T.A

73. “We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that...Also watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence...you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past.” - Alan Wilson Watts

74. “How many stars can you count in the sky? How many mistakes can you count in your life? Stop counting! No clever man ever is stuck in the past!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

75. “‎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

76. “From key signature to coda, from downbeat to the sound of life's final fermata, our pasts set the tone for all that was, that is, and that ever would be.” - Jamie A. Hughes

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

78. “In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

79. “You can never forget the past unless you face up to it.” - Fan Wu

80. “Big events, small, mundane moments of the day–it doesn’t matter; the past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.” - Laura Miller, Butterfly Weeds

81. “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

82. “Some of us enjoy with today, some with future and some other with past.” - Shayne Azad

83. “You can't sail towards your future if you're still anchored in the past.” - Julie-Anne

84. “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

85. “At least if you were ignorant, you could do what you wanted, you had no idea what had been achieved in the past. You were free, instead of chewed at by bleeding impotence, dissolved away like a pearl in acid.” - Hamza wolf

86. “This is your life. This is your moment. Think of all you have been through just to get here… MAKE IT COUNT!” - Steve Maraboli

87. “One of my greatest failures: I was trying to cut a piece of moment so that I could erase it.One of my greatest achievements:I have learnt to ignore my futureless past.” - Munia Khan

88. “Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.” - Jodi Picoult

89. “Tonight his father had caught up, carrying all the horrors of hell with him. His mother could no longer protect him—hide him—and now his father‟s wrath would fall on him. He ran across the fields and through the forest, his bare feet carrying him as fast as they could go, aching and bleeding into the night. He could feel his father‟s eyes on him and his stinking breath filling Raven‟s nostrils as he rushed toward the only place he had ever found safe. He sobbed, choking on his grief and his frustration—the horrible guilt of carrying all the anger from his father into their house making him sick and afraid. He ran with lungs and muscles burning from strain, throwing himself through the doors of the castle when he reached them and only then chancing to look back the way he‟d come.” - Amanda M. Lyons

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

91. “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