Past

A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body. – AndrÃ© Maurois

The past is not a package one can lay away. – Emily Dickinson

Best not to mix the past with the present. The present paints the past with gold. The past paints the present with lead. – Henry Rollins

Praises for our past triumphs are as feathers to a dead bird. – Paul Eldridge

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. – Lesley P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953

The one charm of the past is that it is the past. – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it. – Wendell Berry

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title. – Virginia Woolf

Look not at the days gone by with a forlorn heart. They were simply the dots we can now connect with our present, to help us draw the outline of a beautiful tomorrow. – Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

The obstacles of your past can become the gateways that lead to new beginnings. – Ralph Blum

My soul is not a palace of the past… – James Russell Lowell, “A Glance Behind the Curtain”

Words of snow, which fell last year. – German saying

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. – Golda Meir

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past. – Maurice Maeterlinck

God has no power over the past except to cover it with oblivion. – Pliny the Elder

We need not destroy the past. It is gone. – John Cage