Here’s a collection of past & present quotes that I had sitting around.

Hopefully you can put them to good use. 

Praises for our past triumphs are as feathers to a dead bird. -Paul Eldridge

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

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it. -Mignon McLaughlin

Bring the past only if only you are going to build from it. -Domenico Cieri Estrada

We need not destroy the past. It is gone. -John Cage

I was so in the present moment the past was no longer part of me. -Laurel Hoodwrit

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. -Golda Meir

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

The one charm of the past is that it is the past. -Oscar Wilde

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title. -Virginia Woolf

Don’t let the past steal your present. -Cherralea Morgen

No man is rich enough to buy back his past. -Oscar Wilde

I have memories-but only a fool stores his past in the future. -David Gerrold

There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday. -Robert Nathan

The living moment is everything. -D.H. Lawrence

Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is only thing that counts. -Jean Cocteau

Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee. -Montaigne

Eternity is not something that begins when you are dead. It is going on all the time. -Charlotte Perkins

Forever is composed of nows. -Emily Dickinson

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs. -Euripides

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes. -Carl Sandburg

The past is a good place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. -Anonymous

Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today. -Indian Proverb

People are always asking about the good old days. I say, why don’t you say the good now days? -Robert Young

No yesterdays are ever wasted for those who give themselves to today. -Brendan Francis

I need neither future nor past, but to learn to take today not too fast. -Jeb Dickerson

The past is a guidepost, not a hitching post. -L. Thomas Holdcroft

The past is never there when you try to go back. It exists, but only in memory. To pretend otherwise is to invite a mess. -Chris Cobbs

If you are still talking about what you did yesterday, you haven’t done much today. -Anonymous

Nothing is worth more than this day. -Goethe

The future is always beginning now. -Mark Strand

We steal if we touch tomorrow. It is God’s. -Henry Ward Beecher

Pile up too many tomorrows and you’ll find that you’ve collected nothing but a bunch of empty yesterdays. -The Music Man

In today already walks tomorrow. -Friedrich von Schiller

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. -Abraham Maslow

It’s not what if, it’s what now. -Anonymous

It is only possible to live happily-ever-after on a day-to-day basis. -Margaret Bonnano

Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys. -Andre Gide

Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do. -Jean de la Bruyere

If you worry about what might be, and wonder what might have been, you will ignore what is. -Anonymous

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. -Alan Watts

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness. -James Thurber

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time. -Abraham Lincoln

If you wait for tomorrow, tomorrow comes. If you don’t wait for tomorrow, tomorrow comes. -Senegalese Proverb

We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow. -Fulton Oursler

Opportunities fly by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone. -Jerome K. Jerome

Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way. -Edna Ferber