Past

What is now proved was once only imagined.

But what is past my help is past my care

The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today

I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward

One faces the future with one's past

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday

Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.

We come too late to say anything which has not been said already

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Remember that lost time does not return.

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.

No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral