1. Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.
2. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
3. You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.
4. When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
5. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.
6. The past is always tense, the future perfect.
7. The past is never where you think you left it.
8. Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
9. The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.
10. The past beats inside me like a second heart.
11. Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.
15. The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
16. We are products of our past, but we don’t have to be prisoners of it.
17. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
18. You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
19. Study the past if you would define the future.
20. It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.
21. My past is everything I failed to be.
22. We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.
23. The past can’t hurt you anymore, not unless you let it.
24. My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
25. Sooner or later we’ve all got to let go of our past.
26. You’re just another story I can’t tell anymore.
27. The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.
28. Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.
29. We don’t have to be defined by the things we did or didn’t do in our past. Some people allow themselves to be controlled by regret. Maybe it’s a regret, maybe it’s not. It’s merely something that happened. Get over it.
30. There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.
31. People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.
32. If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world.
33. My past has not defined me, destroyed me, deterred me, or defeated me; it has only strengthened me.
34. Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you’ll find an edge to cut you.
35. I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
36. No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
37. The past is a ghost, the future a dream and all we ever have is now.
38. Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
39. 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.
40. Frustration and Love can’t exist in the same place at the same time, so get real and start doing what you would rather be doing in life. Love your life. All of it. Even the heavy shit that happened to you when you were 8. All of it was and IS perfect.
41. Well I haven’t fucked much with the past, But I’ve fucked plenty with the future.
42. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us…on the inside, looking out.
43. These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
44. I can’t. You can’t rewrite the past.
45. Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.
46. A medicine cat has no time for doubt. Put your energy into today and stop worrying about the past.
47. We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic – now mercifully stilled, thank God – might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.
48. Its more fun to think of the future than dwell on the past.
49. When you understand, that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.
50. Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
51. With each passing moment I’m becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.”
52. I had my chance.’ He said it, retiring from a lifetime of wanting. ‘I had my chance, and sometimes in life, there are no second chances. You look at what you have, not what you miss, and you move forward.
53. One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
54. One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
55. The past is made out of facts… I guess the future is just hope.
56. He looked at the silver pocketknife in his hand. An idea came to him – possibly the stupidest, craziest idea he’d had since he thought, Hey, I’ll get Percy to swim in the River Styx! He’ll love me for that!
57. Our past may explain why we’re suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.
58. Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.
59. 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?
60. If you have a past with which you feel dissatisfied, then forget it, now. Imagine a new story for your life and believe in it. Focus only on the moments when you achieved what you desired, and that strength will help you to get what you want.
