The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
—H. G. Wells
Right actions in the future are the best apologies for bad actions
in the past.
—Tryon Edwards
And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
—John Steinbeck
How many people long for that “past, simpler, and better world,” I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?
—R.A. Salvatore
Nothing has ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?
—Eckhart Tolle
The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
—Wendell Barry
If you live in the past, you don’t enjoy what is happening right now because you will always wish it to be different than it is.
—Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements
A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.
—Sydney J. Harris
My life had gone right; it had gone exactly as it needed to in order to bring me here.
—Beth Harbison in Always Something There to Remind Me
It’s important to keep your options open. It’s important to live and not get hung up on the past. The past is called the past for a reason. If you are constantly looking behind you, your eyes aren’t on the road ahead.
—Rachel Van Dyken in The Bet
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
—Robertson Davies
Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquests.
—Charles Lindbergh
Stop looking at the past and all the things you can’t change. They’re done and over with. Now is the time for you to look to the future, grasp it by the hand, and decide where you want to go.
—Lacey Weatherford in Chasing Nikki
Rather than concentrating on what you should have done, concentrate on what you can do now.
—Rachel Van Dyken in Ruin
I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there.
—Herb Caen