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

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

The past is the past. Who or what we used to be doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is who and what we are now and who and what we can become in the future.

The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.

What is the past but what we choose to remember?

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.

It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it.

The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

In the beginning was the World, but it <i>was</i>, therefore the past existed before the World. He bowed before the supremacy of the past. The Catholic Church would have much to be said for it, but it allowed too little past. Two thousand years, a part of it only recorded, what does that matter compared to traditions of double or treble that space of years? A Catholic priest is surpassed by any Egyptian mummy. Because the mummy is dead, he may think himself superior. But the pyramids are no more dead than St. Peter's, on the contrary, they are much more alive, for they are older. These Romans think that they have all time in the pockets. They refuse to revere their ancestors. That is a blasphemy. God is the past... A time will come when all men will beat their senses into recollections, and all time into the past. A time will come when a single past will embrace all men when there will be nothing except the past, when everyone will have one faith– the past.

The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.

How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.

The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion.
The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future.
Instead, time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness.

The past is the father of the present.

The past is just something that's over.