Past quotes

“What’s past is prologue.”

The past is framed as context rather than the whole story, leaving the future open to further action.

Source note: The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1; Antonio says this while urging Sebastian toward a conspiracy against Alonso. The phrase is therefore embedded in morally compromised dramatic persuasion rather than neutral advice.

“What’s done cannot be undone.”

Some consequences cannot be reversed, so the practical question becomes how to respond now rather than how to erase the past.

Source note: Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1; Lady Macbeth speaks during the sleepwalking scene while confronting actions that cannot be reversed.

“Let the dead Past bury its dead!”

The poem rejects living backward and immediately redirects attention toward action available in the present.

Source note: A Psalm of Life, in the stanza beginning “Trust no Future.”

“The past is never more than an experiment.”

Past conduct provides information rather than an unchangeable verdict; Bennett uses that distinction to argue that present habits can still be revised.

Source note: Mental Efficiency, “Breaking with the Past.” The sentence frames prior experience as material for correction rather than a permanent identity.

“For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”

Life continues forward despite attachment to what has already happened, so care for the past cannot make the present remain there.

Source note: The Prophet, “On Children”; Gibran contrasts parents’ memory of yesterday with children belonging to a life that moves forward.

“Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”

The advice does not erase the past; it questions repeated attention to memories that no longer help the present.

Source note: Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 58.

“The present state of things is the consequence of the former.”

Understanding present conditions requires tracing the earlier choices and causes that produced them rather than treating the present as isolated.

Source note: Rasselas, Chapter XXX; Imlac argues that studying history helps people understand the sources of present benefits and harms.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Remembering earlier failures matters because retained experience can change later judgment instead of allowing the same pattern to recur unnoticed.

Source note: The Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense; Santayana connects memory with the possibility of genuine progress.

“Upon the wreckage of thy yesterday design the structure of to-morrow.”

Past failure is treated as material for reconstruction rather than a final verdict, making tomorrow a project that can be designed from what has already been learned.

Source note: Poems of Progress and New Thought Pastels, “The Structure”; Project Gutenberg #3228. The following lines emphasize purpose, wisdom, resolve and patience, which anchors the rebuilding metaphor.

“I knew it was much to be regretted, but still it was not to be helped.”

Pip recognizes that his changed ambitions separated him from a simpler life he now sees could have been better, yet he also acknowledges that the lost path cannot simply be restored by wishing.

Source note: Great Expectations, Project Gutenberg #1400. Pip says this to Biddy after admitting that settling at the forge with Joe—and perhaps eventually with Biddy—might have made him a different and better-satisfied person. The line is Pip’s fictional first-person speech.

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

Change makes perfect return impossible; the person who revisits yesterday already carries experiences that alter the comparison.

Source note: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

“The contemplation of noble ruins produces a melancholy that exalts the mind.”

Ruins become a prompt for reflective melancholy: visible traces of the past enlarge thought by placing present concerns against time, mortality, and historical change.

Source note: Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark; the remark occurs during Wollstonecraft’s reflections on landscape, ruins, history, and mortality.

“I have some desire to enjoy the present good, and some fondness for the past”

Hazlitt states his own temporal bias plainly: he values present experience and retains an attachment to what has already been lived rather than treating only the future as significant.

Source note: Table-Talk, essay III, “On the Past and Future.” The essay appears in the 1821 first volume; the represented wording is from the public-domain Project Gutenberg text of Table-Talk.

“To mourn a mischief that is past and gone is the next way to draw new mischief on.”

Grief over what cannot be changed can become a second injury when it prevents attention to what can still be done.

Source note: Othello, Act 1, Scene 3; the Duke urges Brabantio not to compound an irreversible loss by continuing to feed it with fresh grief.

“For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!””

Whittier compresses regret into the imagined alternative life: both Maud and the Judge later measure their ordinary lives against a possibility neither chose when they briefly met.

Source note: “Maud Muller,” in The Works of Whittier, Volume I, Project Gutenberg #9567. The poem first shows both characters imagining the life they might have shared, then calls “It might have been” the saddest formulation before ending with a separate note of hope.

“such home-comings keep hearts tender and hands helpful with the memories of young and happy days.”

Returning to a formative home can renew affection and willingness to help because shared memories continue to bind people after their lives have scattered.

Source note: Jo's Boys, Chapter 1, Project Gutenberg #3499. Narrator commentary about former Plumfield pupils returning as adults; it is not Alcott autobiography.

“Here is the ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was the former door Where the dead feet walked in.”

A familiar interior is revisited through traces of people who have died, turning worn architecture into a physical prompt for family memory and loss.

Source note: “The Self-Unseeing,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. The poem reconstructs a remembered domestic scene; its dead belong to that literary memory.

“Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs; and I enjoy, in common with all other men, at least my share of such inheritance.”

Old Martin treats regret as an almost ordinary inheritance of age: living long enough produces memories of choices, estrangements and missed opportunities that cannot all be revisited without hindsight.

Source note: Martin Chuzzlewit, Chapter X, Project Gutenberg #968. Old Martin Chuzzlewit says this while speaking to Pecksniff. The scene is part of a deliberately strategic performance inside the novel, so the maxim remains attached to the character rather than being flattened into direct Dickens autobiography.

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

The quatrain turns irreversibility into an image of writing that cannot be erased: tears, intelligence and devotion cannot literally rewrite what has already entered the past.

Source note: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, quatrain LI in Edward FitzGerald’s English rendering, Project Gutenberg #246. The famous English wording is FitzGerald’s creative translation and adaptation, so the record does not present it as a literal English sentence written by the historical Omar Khayyam.

“If we look back to the history of efforts which have made great changes, it is astonishing how many of them seemed hopeless to those who looked on in the beginning.”

Deronda argues that later historical success can obscure how improbable reform movements looked at their beginning, making apparent hopelessness a poor measure of eventual consequence.

Source note: Daniel Deronda; Deronda speaks in a discussion of political and national efforts, with historical reform as the immediate context.