- A man’s memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present. ~ George Santayana
- Every man is his own ancestor and every man his own heir. He devises his own fortune, and he inherits his own past. ~ Francis Herbert Hedge
- Every man’s life lies within the present; for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain. ~ Marcus Aurelius
- I do not know which makes a man more conservative — to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past. ~ John Maynard Keynes
- I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. ~ William Shakespeare
- If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find we have lost the future. ~ Winston Churchill
- Live in the present. The past is gone; the future is unknown — but the present is real, and your opportunities are now. You must see these opportunities; they must be real for you. The catch is that they can’t seem real if your mind is buried in past failures, if you keep reliving old mistakes, old guilts, and old tragedies. Fight your way above the many inevitable Traumatizations of your ego, escape damnation by the past, and look to the opportunities of the present. I don’t mean some vague moment in the present — next week or next month, perhaps. I mean today, this minute. ~ Maxwell Maltz
- Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fear of the future. ~ Antoine Rivarol
- Man… Cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs that chain runs with him. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- No man is rich enough to buy back his past. ~ Oscar Wilde
- No matter what a man’s past may have been, his future is spotless. ~ John R. Rice
- The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. ~ Oscar Wilde
- With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.~ George Eliot
