Quotes, maxims and aphorisms - past - Buboquote.com

Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.

François de La Rochefoucauld - Reflections, or Sentences and Moral Maxims /

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Albert Einstein /

Nor is it right to say there are three times: past, present and future. Perhaps it would be more correct to say: there are three times: a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future.

Augustine of Hippo - Confessions /

The present is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action.

Simone de Beauvoir /

The present is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action.

Whoever you are, here is your master:
He is, was or will be.

Voltaire - Poésies mêlées /

When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.

Alexis de Tocqueville /

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

René Descartes /

Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us.

Jean de La Bruyere - Les Caractères /

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.

Gautama Buddha /

The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future.

Ralph Waldo Emerson - The American Scholar /

Consciousness is a link between what was and what will be; a bridge between the past and the future.

Henri Bergson - L’Énergie spirituelle /

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Henri Bergson - Creative Evolution /

The time present of things past is memory; the time present of things present is direct experience; the time present of things future is expectation.

Augustine of Hippo - Confessions /

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.

Victor Hugo - The Man Who Laughs /

What is past is prologue.

William Shakespeare - The Tempest /

past

Everything that was is no longer; everything that will be is not yet. Look no further for the secret of our ills.

Alfred de Musset /

The present is big with the future; the future could be read in the past; the distant is expressed in the near.

Gottfried Leibniz - Principes de la nature et de la grâce /

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.

Ah, who brings the happy moments,
Glorious days of sweet first love;
Who can bring back a single hour
Of that blessed time again.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe /

It is pleasant to think of labours that are past.

Marcus Tullius Cicero /

If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

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.

Henry David Thoreau /

The mysterious way leads inwards. Eternity with its worlds — the past and future — is in ourselves or nowhere.

Novalis - Pollen /

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

George Bernard Shaw