Past Quotes

Proust's tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm.

There were never that many women stand-up comics in the past because the power to make people laugh is also a power that gets people upset.

I'm not sure that it's up to me to sum up what I've done with it in the past. I'm not sure there's a way of knowing what we have done that is useful or important.

I spent one night in the hospital in my life. I was past 75 when that occurred.

I think since Watergate people are interested in what the past of this country was really like.

The past is pregnant with the present.

But how many moments are already past! Ah! who thinks of those that are past?

I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

Technology is a many-headed monster and perhaps it would be better to regress to a safer past and avoid technological change; it is tempting to think like that.

I have done hard jobs in the past, and acting isn't one of them.

And I hope that we can learn the lessons of the past in looking at the current challenge that China poses to a ruling America.

It's not an insult to have a past and to have some accountability to it.

There aren't any looks or customs I wish would come back. Today almost anything goes. Culture constantly devours the past so there's not much that's missing.

. . . hope resides in the future, while perspective and wisdom are almost always found by looking to the past.

The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can't hurt you the way the future can.

For the past fourteen years, it's been my job to push past my boundaries and do things I never thought I could do, which is why it's been such a fulfilling career.

People are powerfully moved by imagination, belief, and knowledge. They can consider the past and future. They can make changes in their behavior out of reason, in a way that animals can’t do.

During the past few years I have led a sometimes hard battle for German foreign policy.

The past is as powerless to darken the present moment as is a shadow to reach up and drag down the form that casts it.

One of the things that I've learned working with Madonna is you just move forward. It's really rare that she ever brings up the past.

I find it really difficult to even articulate things that I've done in the past. I express myself through the characters that I play, not through the articulation of them later.

I've been asked to do action-oriented movies in the past and they just haven't been right for me.

I'm trying to be present, not thinking and worrying about the past or the future. That's such a waste of time, you know?

The scientists are really scared. Their [global warming] observations over the past two or three years suggest that everything is happening a lot faster than their climate models predicted.

The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.

You can only understand the present age when it is past.

... we may remember what the Romansthought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.

Motherhood rarely allows for solitude, yet it begets its own kind of isolation: from one's past, from one's youth, from the women we once thought we were and would become.

Divinity is the elementary personality of a human being. When he can stand before corruption and win, that is an undivided personality. It is called divinity.

Love yourself. Love your soul and let go of the past. Past pain is keeping you in pain. You don't have to deteriorate.

I'm nothing. Nothing at all without writing. Without truth, my truth, the only truth I know, it's all a gambol in the pasture without rhythm or sense.

If ever the call comes to them, the young will go straight from the ranks of the neutralists into the ranks of he Majesty's Forces, as they have so often done in the past.

The soul awakes ... between two dim eternities - the eternal past, the eternal future.

If we want an America of heroes, we need to cherish our heroes of the past.

I'm not as focused on my acting career as I have been in the past.

I think in most companies you're surrounded by the past. You may have a Web site or archives or a lobby that sort of shows off your work of the past. The future is not as tangible.

New Mexico has been, in the past, a swing state.

Why are women so fond of raking up the past? They're as bad as tailors, who invariably remember what you owe them for a suit long after you've ceased to wear it.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present.

At twenty your choices are almost unlimited. At fifty you're a prisoner of past decisions. At seventy you have no free will left at all.

Our yesterdays Are like a lonely and a ruined land Wherein a breeze of recollection sighs-- A fading land to which is no return.

With Superman, there are certain limitations for an actor. You can't go past certain boundaries because then you cease to be what the character is.

History is the heritage and patrimony of mankind in its lessons of the past that give priceless inspiration for the future.

Let go of the past and live the future . . . Live the life you imagined.

Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?

It would be no reproach to a philosopher, that he knew the future better than the past, or even than the present. It is better worth knowing.

I have no designs on society, or nature, or God. I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. I love to live.

You may tell by looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not.