The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's.

Everything that is remembered about the past is washed, and often drowned, in nostalgia, pride, illusions and passions of all kinds.

The past is all patterns, and those patterns remain beneath our feet, even as the stars above reveal their own patterns — for the stars we gaze upon each night are naught but an illusion from the past.

You think your past defines you, and worse, you think that it is an unchangeable reality, when really, your perception of it changes as you do.

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

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

The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately — and against ordinary experience — vanished. The man contains — not the boy — but earlier men, he thought. History began a long time ago.

We all have history. You can think you’re over your history. You can think the past is the past. And then something happens, often innocuous, that shows you how far you are from over it. The past is always with you.

The past went a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.

The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight - all their lives.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

The past is nothing more than the meaning you ascribe to it. Traumatic experiences can be changed. They are not fixed.

There is a stillness and everlastingness about the past; it changes not and has a touch of eternity, like a painted picture or a statue in bronze or marble. Unaffected by the storms and upheavals of the present, it maintains its dignity and repose and tempts the troubled spirit and the tortured mind to seek shelter in its vaulted catacombs. There is peace there and security, and one may even sense a spiritual quality.
But it is not life, unless we can find the vital links between it and the present with all its conflicts and problems. It is a kind of art for art's sake, without the passion and the urge to action which are the very stuff of life. Without that passion and urge, there is a gradual oozing out of hope and vitality, a settling down on lower levels of existence, a slow merging into non-existence. We become prisoners of the past and some part of its immobility sticks to us.

You think your past defines you, and worse, you think that it is an unchangeable reality, when really, your perception of it changes as you do.
Because experience is always multi-dimensional, there are a variety of memories, experiences, feelings, “gists” you can choose to recall…and what you choose is indicative of your present state of mind. So many people get caught up in allowing the past to define them or haunt them simply because they have not evolved to the place of seeing how the past did not prevent them from achieving the life they want, it facilitated it. This doesn’t mean to disregard or gloss over painful or traumatic events, but simply to be able to recall them with acceptance and to be able to place them in the storyline of your personal evolution.