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Therefore Agathon rightly says: "Of this alone even God is
deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have
been."
Author: Aristotle
Source: Ethics (bk. VI, ch. II), (R.W. Browne's translation)
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The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is
found in the effect was already in the cause.
Author: Henri Louis Bergson
Source: Creative Evolution (ch. I)
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No traces left of all the busy scene,
But that remembrances says: The things have been.
Author: Samuel Boyse
Source: The Deity
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But how carve way i' the life that lies before,
If bent on groaning ever for the past?
Author: Robert Browning
Source: Balaustion's Adventure
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Thou unrelenting past.
Author: William Cullen Bryant
Source: To the Past
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The light of other days is faded,
And all their glories past.
Author: Alfred Bunn
Source: The Maid of Artois
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The age of chivalry is gone.--That of sophisters, economists and
calculators has succeeded.
Author: Edmund Burke
Source: Reflections on the Revolution in France
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John Anderson, my jo, John,
When we were first acquent,
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bonny brow was brent.
Author: Robert Burns
Source: John Anderson
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Gone--glimmering through the dream of things that were.
Author: Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron)
Source: Childe Harold (canto II, st. 2)
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The best of prophets of the future is the past.
Author: Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron)
Source: Letter
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The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Source: Essays--Characteristics
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O, to bring back the great Homeric time,
The simple manners and the deed sublime:
When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate,
Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight.
Author: Mortimer Collins
Source: Letter to the Rt. Hon. B. Disraeli, M.P., published anonymously 1869
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Listen to the Water-Mill:
Through the live-long day
How the clicking of its wheel
Wears the hours away!
Languidly the Autumn wind
Stirs the forest leaves,
From the field the reapers sing
Binding up their sheaves:
And a proverb haunts my mind
As a spell is cast,
"The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past."
Author: Sarah Doudney
Source: Lesson of the Water-Mill
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Not heaven itself upon the past has power;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
Author: John Dryden
Source: Imitation of Horace (bk. III, ode XXIX, l. 71)
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The days of rejoicing are gone forever.
[Fr., Ils sont passes ces jours de fete.]
Author: Jacques Du Lorens
Source: Le Tableau Parlant
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Oh! the good times when we were so unhappy.
[Fr., Oh le bon temps ou etions si malheureux.]
Author: Alexandre Dumas pere
Source: The Conspirators (II, 318), (also titled Le Chevalier d'Harmental)
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The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Author: Leslie Poles Hartley
Source: The Go-Between (epigraph)
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O Death! O Change! O Time!
Without you, O! the insufferable eyes
Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
These fatuous, ineffectual yesterdays.
Author: William Ernest Henley
Source: Rhymes and Rhythms (XIII)
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Praise they that will times past, I joy to see
My selfe now live: this age best pleaseth mee.
Author: Robert Herrick
Source: The Present Time Best Pleaseth
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O God! Put back Thy universe and give me yesterday.
Author: Henry Arthur Jones
Source: Silver King
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Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of
romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past so long as
there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
Author: Charles Kingsley
Source: Life (vol. II, ch. XXVIII)
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Enjoy the spring of love and youth,
To some good angel leave the rest,
For time will teach thee soon the truth,
"There are no birds in last year's nest."
Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Source: It is not always May
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We remain
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past.
Author: James Russell Lowell
Source: The Cathedral (l. 234)
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The good of other times let people state;
I think it lucky I was born so late.
[Lat., Prisca juvent alios; ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor.]
Author: Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
Source: Ars Amatoria (III, 121), (translation by Sydney Smith)
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Weep no more, lady, weep no more,
Thy sorrowe is in vaine,
For violets pluckt, the sweetest showers
Will ne'er make grow againe.
Author: Thomas Percy
Source: Reliques--The Friar of Order Gray
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It is one thing to learn about the past; it is another to wallow in it.
Author: Kenneth Auchincloss
Source: None
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Nostalgia is a seductive liar.
Author: George W. Ball
Source: None
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I cannot sing the old songs, Or dream those dreams again,
Author: Charlotte Barnard
Source: None
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As lousy as things are now, tomorrow they will be somebody's good old days.
Author: Gerald Barzan
Source: None
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We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished- for state. When did history become a bad word?
Author: John Guare
Source: None
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To be able to look back upon one's past life with satisfaction is to live twice.
Author: Marcus Valerius Martial
Source: None
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Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
Source: None
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Don't brood on the past, but don't forget it either.
Author: Thomas H. Raddal
Source: None
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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
Author: Adrienne Rich
Source: None
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The next day is never so good as the day before.
Author: Publilius Syrus
Source: None
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Those who do remember it will find new ways to screw it up.
Author: Charles Wolfe
Source: None
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It's linkage I'm talking about, and harmonies and structures, And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.
Author: Charles Wright
Source: None
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Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.
Author: William Penn
Source: None
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Those who misremember the past are pleased to repreat it as "proof.".
Author: Mike Huybensz
Source: None
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The past always looks better than it was; it's only pleasant because it isn't here.
Author: Finley Peter Dunne
Source: None
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To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.
Author: Charles Caleb Colton
Source: None
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I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
Author: Carl Sandburg
Source: None
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The free world must now prove itself worthy of its own past.
Author: Dwight D. Eisenhower
Source: None
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The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
Author: Henri Bergson
Source: None
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Study the past if you would divine the future.
Author: Confucius
Source: None
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