From The Past Quotes

While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.
- Ronald Reagan

Rising from the past, my shadow
Is running in silence to meet me.
- Anna Akhmatova

Your message is stupid. Iraq is not afraid of you or anyone else when it has a right to claim. What you warned about is not on Iraq's agenda. Iraq is vital and powerful. It is not an opportunistic country. Your administration has not learned from the past.
- Mohammed Aldouri

He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.
- Kate Atkinson

Learn from the past, but don't live in the past.
- Steve Maraboli

Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'.
- Paul Auster

Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you--you should control them.
- Haruki Murakami

It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.
- George Harrison

My world got very big,
very fast, and based on a lot of sad examples
from the past,
a lot of people expect me to get lost in it
- Justin Bieber

The pages that follow will be our journey of the life we built together here in Concord, North Carolina. These pages will reveal fragments from the past and events that occurred along the way. ---Lizzie After the War--by Nancy B. Brewer-www.nancybbrewer.com-Amazon/kindle and Nook
- Nancy B Brewer

Not really. I suppose it depends on how you look at it. For me... well, it just adds a richness you wouldn't otherwise get. People come, people gothey'll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past.
- Nicholas Sparks

I'm the last person to ask 'what do you remember' from a particular time period... I like to learn from the past... not 'live' in it.
- David Coverdale

The dark shadow we seem to see in the distance is not really a mountain ahead, but the shadow of the mountain behind - a shadow from the past thrown forward into our future. It is a dark sludge of historical sectarianism. We can leave it behind us if we wish.
- David Trimble

The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence.
- Gilbert K Chesterton

I've heard it said before that those who don't learn from the past are bound to repeat it, and I just don't know what I think about that. I figure I don't have too much use for it. The past will just weigh on you if you spend too much time remembering it.--Land More Kind Than Home
- Wiley Cash

A person who doesn't learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation.
- Stephen King

Aidan from the past: He took her hands in his bloodied, callused ones. "Accept me?" His eyes glowed, his lashes spiked from rain.
Declan in the present: He gripped her nape. "I fuckin love you, Regin!" Rain spiked his lashes as he gazed down at her, commanding her, "Love me back!
- Kresley Cole

Could we possibly be from the place we want to be? Were we from the place we died rather than the place we were born? Are our aspirations our home? Maybe we are from that place to which we're bound, and that's why desire hurts so much, this longing to find a place to rest, to get home. We're not from the past, but the future.
- Joe Coomer

Look, Mother, I am never going to be thin.
I'm Norwegian. If you wanted a thin daughter, you should not have married a man whose female ancestors carried cows home from the pasture
- Jennifer Crusie

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.
- Don Delillo

Because that is what happens when you try to run from the past. It doesn't just catch up: it overtakes, blotting out the future, the landscape, the very sky, until there is no path left except that which leads through it.
- Sarah Dessen

All I'd ever wanted was to forget. But even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below. Because that is what happens when you try to run from the past. It doesn't just catch up: it overtakes, blotting out the future, the landscape, the very sky, until there is no path left except that which leads through it, the only one that can ever get you home.
- Sarah Dessen

Because this is what happens when you try to run from the past. it doesn't just catch up: it overtakes, blotting out the future, the landscape, the very sky, until there is no path left except that which leads through it, the only one that can ever get you home.
- Sarah Dessen

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)
- Norman Doidge

The shadow by my finger cast
Divides the future from the past:
Before it, sleeps the unborn hour,
In darkness, and beyond thy power.
Behind its unreturning line,
The vanished hour, no longer thine:
One hour alone is in thy hands,-
The NOW on which the shadow stands.
- Henry Van Dyke

The Sun-Dial at Wells College
The shadow by my finger cast
Divides the future from the past:
Before it, sleeps the unborn hour
In darkness, and beyond thy power:
Behind its unreturning line,
The vanished hour, no longer thine:
One hour alone is in thy hands,--
The NOW on which the shadow stands.
- Henry Van Dyke

We need to open up the future. We also need to keep everything valuable from the past.
- John Eaton

Are you talking about me?" Danny looked up from the pastry board, suspicion written clearly across his face.
"Just bemoaning your tragic heterosexuality," Win sighed, swinging his knives down on the prep station.
"Oh," Danny said, blinking. "Well. Sorry about that, but there's not much I can do about it."
Win waved that away. "No big. I'm not that into workplace romance, myself.
- Louisa Edwards

We have all examined our past critically and are very much aware of even the unpleasant things. Now, we need to look at what we plan to do with the lessons we have learned from the past.
- Heinz Fischer

My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.
- Richard Ford

In case you guys didn't catch last week's episode, I'm out of the flock," I informed them. "Angel has no allegiance to me. She's wanted me gone for a long time. And in case you didn't catch all the episodes from the past year, Angel is... unbalanced."
"Untrustworthy," Fang seconded.
"Unpredictable," Jeb added.
"Dangerous," Dylan chimed in.
- James Patterson

Thus, the questions we should ask here are what makes the current economic upswing different from the past two recoveries, and whether such differences are sufficient for the economy to reach the sustained growth path.
- Toshihiko Fukui

We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.
- Lyndon B Johnson

You know when you're young you think you will always be. As you become more fragile, you reflect and you realize how much comfort can come from the past. Hymns can carry you into the future.
- Andy Griffith

There is no getting away from the past or from one's destiny.
- Laxmi Hariharan

In charting our course to the future, we are mindful of our path from the past.
- Brad Henry

The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,--flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time.
- John Greenleaf Whittier

And the present sheared asunder from the past, like an iceberg sheared off from its frozen parent cliffs, and went sailing out to sea in lonely pride. All the past ages had accomplished was as nothing.
- Aldous Huxley

Most creative work is a process of people passing ideas and inspirations from the past into the future and adding their own creativity along the way.
- Joichi Ito

Learn from the past, prepare for the future, live in the present.
- Thomas S Monson

When you do not know how to focus your thoughts effectively, they can become scattered, miscellaneous, and fixated on "stuff"-negative notions, toxic relationships, and situations from the past.
- Darren L Johnson

We must stop listening to voices from the past--and we must stop immediately.--Father Tim
- Jan Karon

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.
- Kevin Kelly

They say that's what happens when you fall in love. You want to tell people things. You especially want to tell them sad things. Hidden sad things from the past. Something like: I was abandoned at a sweetshop in an unspecified European country.
- Nina Lacour

He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past.
- Jhumpa Lahiri

It is all connected Dominick," she said. "Life is not a series of isolated ponds & puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on it's way to the future.
- Wally Lamb

It was cold, and he was coughing. A fine cold draught blew over the knoll. He thought of the woman. Now he would have given all he had or ever might have to hold her warm in his arms, both of them wrapped in one blanket, and sleep. All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.
- D H Lawrence

All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.
- D H Lawrence

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past
- Karl Marx

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

time was just a hangover from the past with no present meaning
- Norman Maclean

We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.
- Margaret Macmillan

He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
- Cormac Mccarthy

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
- Cormac Mccarthy

If the future is to remain open and free, we need people who can tolerate the unknown, who will not need the support of completely worked out systems or traditional blueprints from the past.
- Margaret Mead

Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.
- Lorrie Moore

From the pastor who has an affair with his secretary, to the jerk at the office who happens to be a deacon, to the overbearing boss who can't miss his Monday night Bible study, Christians today cause more problems for the gospel than all the devil's demons put together.
- Wes Moore

The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.
- Jan Morris

As Indians, we must of course learn from the past; but we must remain focused on the future. In my view, education is the true alchemy that can bring India its next golden age.
- Pranab Mukherjee

Learn from the past, look to the future, but live in the present.
- Petra Nemcova

Typically what happens is, somebody drags an idea from the past that worked in an old set of logics that they try to apply to the new one. And it doesn't work.
- Michael Nesmith

We had a choice between Democrats who couldn't learn from the past and Republicans who couldn't stop living in it..
- P J Orourke

It's hard to pinpoint why all of a sudden a group of Australian films will be doing well and why they perhaps are better made than some from the past.
- Guy Pearce

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.
The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.
- Walker Percy

What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.
- Walker Percy

You can't build your life around hurts from the past
-Tyler Perry
The Family That Preys
- Tyler Perry

It seems like people don't learn from the past.
- Thomas Peterffy

Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
- Robert M Pirsig

We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
- Karl Popper

When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory
- Marcel Proust

Life is about trusting your feelings and taking chances, losing and finding happiness, appreciating the memories, learning from the past, and realizing people change.
- Atul Purohit

I don't really believe in regret. I think you can always learn from the past, but I wouldn't want a different life.
- Molly Ringwald

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

Blake stared at me and I sensed what he was getting at - there wasn't anybody important, he was going to be in New York permanently after law school. As I stood there looking at him, Summer popped into my mind. I heard her saying "I don't think much about guys from the past. I'm glad I know them, but there's a reason they didn't make it into my future". Back then I had thought she was probably right. Now I was sure.
- Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
- Salman Rushdie

...diverting one's attention from the past was not the same as envisioning and embarking upon a future. On the other hand, if the past were razed, the slate wiped clean, maybe fewer people would confuse it with the future, and that at least would be something.
- Richard Russo

Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.
- James Salter

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.
- May Sarton

The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.
- W G Sebald

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.
- Jeanette Winterson

Earth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that has happened since time began. Of time before time, she says little, and in a language that no one has yet understood. Through time, her secret codes have gradually been broken. Her mud and lava is a message from the past.
Of time to come, she says much, but who listens?
- Jeanette Winterson

It was a kiss from the past.
- Zadie Smith

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.
- Susan Sontag

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
- Baruch Spinoza

Keep all special thoughts and memories for lifetimes to come. Share these keepsakes with others to inspire hope and build from the past, which can bridge to the future.
- Mattie Stepanek

You yourself never loved; you never love!
Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so?
- Bram Stoker

It should not be a surprise, even if it is not expected, if a shadow dances among the leaves, a face appears (or seems to), even a community of phantoms from the past. Here you will find answers, questions, and a host of stories.
- Mary Lois Timbes

I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That's were the fun is.
- Donald Trump

At times, it's better to think of exactly what is happening right in front of you every second, rather than going through things from the past in your mind.
- Nancy E Turner

Learn from the past, set vivid, detailed goals for the future, and live in the only moment of time over which you have any control: now.
- Denis Waitley

Losers live in the past. Winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present toward the future.
- Denis Waitley

Vinyl is the real deal. I've always felt like, until you buy the vinyl record, you don't really own the album. And it's not just me or a little pet thing or some kind of retro romantic thing from the past. It is still alive.
- Jack White

Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.
- William Wordsworth

But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason...Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning.
- Jane Yolen

If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.
- Fareed Zakaria

The theme of the dance was "Great Romances," or some such nonsense. There were projections of supposedly great couples from the past on the walls of the gym. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Hermione and Ron, Bonnie and Clyde, etc.
- Gabrielle Zevin

Factors affecting effective regional cooperation are mindsets and perceptions emanating from the past.
- Khaleda Zia