Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Therefore Agathon rightly says: "Of this alone even God is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been."

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

No traces left of all the busy scene, But that remembrances says: The things have been.

But how carve way i' the life that lies before, If bent on groaning ever for the past?

Thou unrelenting past.

The light of other days is faded, And all their glories past.

The age of chivalry is gone.--That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.

John Anderson, my jo, John, When we were first acquent, Your locks were like the raven, Your bonny brow was brent.

Gone--glimmering through the dream of things that were.

The best of prophets of the future is the past.

The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

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.

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."

Not heaven itself upon the past has power; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

The days of rejoicing are gone forever.

Oh! the good times when we were so unhappy.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

O Death! O Change! O Time! Without you, O! the insufferable eyes Of these poor Might-Have-Beens, These fatuous, ineffectual yesterdays.

Praise they that will times past, I joy to see My selfe now live: this age best pleaseth mee.

O God! Put back Thy universe and give me yesterday.