Quote Lady's Quotes by Subject, Past

The Past

Although you should not erase your responsibility for the past, when you make the past your jailer, you destroy your future. It is such a great moment of liberation when you learn to forgive yourself, let the burden go, and walk out into a new path of promise and possibility. --John O'Donohue (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.--J.F. Kennedy
Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the answer.--Gloria Steinem
The cultural influences in our country are like the floo floo bird. I am referring to the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been.--Frank Lloyd Wright
If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.--William James
It is the rare person who, looking back over his life and seeing what he has done to it, hasn't sighed for a chance to redeem what he has cheaply used or carelessly ruined. If only somehow, somewhere, there was a way to live again the days we have darkened with our blind haste - the innumerable occasions when our indifference trod on all the pearls of God's graciousness; the times when our pride, or our fear, or our meanness poured the acid of contempt over the fair countenance of another's soul! If this grace were ours, how we would leap to the chance!--Samuel Howard Miller (The Life of the Soul)
It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive ... that the mind might perform its functions without incumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.--Samuel Johnson (The Idler)
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe--though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now because it's in the past, because we have survived.--Susan Sontag
It's been said that there are two days over which we have no control: yesterday, because it's a cancelled check, and tomorrow, because it's a promissory note.--Diane Conway (What Would You Do If You Had No Fear?)
It's easy to carry the past as a burden instead of a school. It's easy to let it overwhelm you instead of educate you.--Jim Rohn (Jim Rohn's Weekly E-zine, Feb. 18, 2003)
I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.--Anthony Robbins
Living in the moment means letting go of the past and not waiting for the future. It means living your life consciously, aware that each moment you breathe is a gift.--Oprah Winfrey
The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present.--Barbara De Angelis
The most important revelation about the past stems from the realization that it is not important to try and get rid of it, but to realize that we are already, by definition, rid of it. We need not be convinced of the importance of living in the present, but instead realize that we inevitably live in the present, and the only thing to id is to face it. ... Whether we like it or not, we cannot escape the present. The only reality is now.--George Lawrence-Ell (The Invisible Clock)
Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you'll ever meet the real is now-here.--Richard Rohr (Jesus' Plan for a New World)
Never run away from the past, face it and learn from it.--Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts, and Linda Woolverton (The Lion King)
One problem with gazing too frequently into the past is that we may turn around to find the future has run out on us.--Michael Cibenko
One reason God created time was so that there would be a place to bury the failures of the past.--James Long (Leadership Magazine, Winter 1997)
Our past and present are only our means; the future is always our end. Thus we never really live, but only hope to live.--Blaise Pascal
The past has passed; the time for grace is now! Let's respond to the grace of this moment with the gifts of the Spirit active in our lives...--Kimberly Hahn (Graced and Gifted: Biblical Wisdom for the Homemaker's Heart)
The past is a foreign country they do things differently there.--Lesley Poles Hartley (The Go-Between)
The past is a guide post, not a hitching post.--L. Thomas Holdcroft
Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.--Dale Turner
The stories that you tell about your past shape your future.--Eric Ransdell (in Fast Company)
There are two days in the week about which and upon which I never worry. Two carefree days, kept sacredly free from fear and apprehension. One of these days is Yesterday... And the other ... is Tomorrow.--Robert Jones Burdette
There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you--if you don't repeat it.--Pearl Bailey
There may be no more pleasing picture in the world than that of a child peering into a book--the past and the future entrancing each other.--Roger Rosenblau
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. But of course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top that defines the sides.--Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, knowing that once it was all that was humanly possible.--George Santayana
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.--George Orwell
You can no longer look to the past in an attempt to predict your future. A large part of the present is obsolete and, for most people, much of the future is beyond comprehension.--Christopher Hegarty