4,591 Quotes About Past

Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest— where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

Take revenge, not by hurting someone, but by succeeding in life and helping those who were hurting you in the past.

Happiness is a state of mind, so our miseries and joy come from living in any of the three dimensions of time—past, present and future. Hence, if we wish to live happily, we must learn to remove sufferings not only from the present, but also from the past and future.

I look out into the water and up deep into the stars. I beg the sparkling lanterns of light to cure me of myself — my past and the kaleidoscope of mistakes, failures and wrong turns that have stacked unbearable regret upon my shoulders.

My own mental well-being is a noose resting on the curve of my breastbone, just waiting for some traumatic event to force the rope taut. But maybe it doesn’t have to be some life-altering event that pulls me under the tide, but rather something minor, insignificant, like a pebble thrown into the ocean of life.

[…] nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one’s embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one’s home.

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.

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.

There is no need returning anger to those who made your past horrible, do not think of making them feel bitter, maybe a help from you can just make them ashame and miserable, and can probably change their attitude.