"You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin."
— Mother Teresa

"When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"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

"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."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"The past is a ghost, the future a dream and all we ever have is now."
— Bill Cosby

"When you understand," Brandy says, "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," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"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."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"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 (Streams of Silver)

"Sometimes the past can hurt.You can either run from it or you can learn from it."
— The Lion King

"…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future."
— Chaim Potok (Davita's Harp)

"The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know."
— Harry S. Truman

"No man is rich enough to buy back his past."
— Oscar Wilde

"It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down...."
— Kate Morton (The House at Riverton)

"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."
— Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca)

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
— Albert Einstein

"You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going."
— Geraldine Brooks (March)

"Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered for they are gone forever."
— Horace Mann

"The past is never where you think you left it."
— Katherine Anne Porter

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins"
— T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land and Other Poems)

"History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged."
— Oscar Wilde

"The past is to be respected and acknowledged, but not worshipped; it is our future in which we will find our greatness."
— Pierre Trudeau

""What's done is done""
— Macbeth

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

"Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread."
— H. P. Lovecraft

"Sometimes I think I live more closely to the past than the present."
— Patricia Briggs (Dragon Bones)

"I desire no future that will break the ties of the past."
— George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss)

"You cannot know where your people are going if you don't know where your people have been."
— Forrest Carter (The Education of Little Tree)

"...the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is."
— Lenny Bruce

"Who are we really? Combinations of common chemicals that perform mechanical actions for a few years before crumbling back into the original components? Fresh new souls, drawn at random for some celestial cupboard where God keeps an unending supply?

or the same soul, immortal and eternal, refurbished and reused through endless lives, by that thrifty Housekeeper? In Her wisdom and benevolence She wipes off the memory slates, as part of the cleaning process, because if we could remember all the things we have experienced in earlier lives, we might object to risking it again. "
— Elizabeth Peters

"We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable."
— Frans Kellendonk (Het complete werk)

"It was easy not to think of my future; I didn't have one."
— James Ellroy

"It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence."
— Samuel Butler (Erewhon Revisited)

"...well darling, keep busy, and take the advice of an old woman; find happiness inside of you, don't rely on others for happiness; its hard, but I found it to be rather true.""
— Alla Nazimova

"... but its wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out of you.""
— khaled

""You can clean your sword as much as you want but the blood still stains it.""
— Matsuro