The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history.

He knew there were disappointments that lasted as long as life.

To simply let your past self dominate your present-day thoughts, words, and actions is to miss out on fully living your life. Doing this means you are stuck in a loop where you are repeatedly replaying the past and strengthening patterns that don’t necessarily enhance your happiness. Reinforcing the past keeps you stagnant, which may be easy in the moment because the past is familiar, but ultimately does not serve you well. The river of life wants to move you toward embracing change.

The long series of disappointments you accumulate in a lifetime can stop you from moving forward into all the goodness God has planned for you – and that means they’ll be stopping not only you, but also all those God has destined you to reach along your life journey.

What came is gone forever every time

History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.

Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.

If you’re constantly focusing on the future and pinning your happiness there, you’ll be chronically unhappy in the present.

When we stay stuck in the unhappy story of what we have done we deny ourselves the gift of transformation. Learning from our past is not the same as being held hostage by the things we have done. At some stage we must let go of the past and begin again.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness.

Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

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.

Make a bad beginning and you’ll contend with troubles ever after.