Confucius Quotes

The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

History is the best guide to the future.

I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

The further backward we look, the further forward we are likely to see.

The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.

Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

Predicting the future is very difficult. As a historian I have trouble trying to predict the past.

Ere we can forecast the future we must understand the present and bring a just sense of proportion to our review of the history of the past.

It is only by reflecting on the past that one can create a better future.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

The only thing that interests me is history - reviewing the past and making something out of it.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

Learning from the past helps to ensure that mistakes are not repeated.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

We are products of the past and its useful to remember that as we move into the future.

In history, as in traveling, men usually see only what they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history, who do not bring much with them to its study.

The careful study of the past enlarges our foresight in contemporary affairs and affords to citizens and to monarchs lessons of incitement or warning in the ordering of public policy

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

The future is unknowable, but the past may give us hope.

You must read history forward and not backward.

History is the single discipline from the world of learning that most informs action in the world. So if you ask world leaders what guides them in making decisions about a new circumstance that they have just encountered it is usually implicitly “a little like this” or “a little like” something else that happened in the past. They use that much more than they use political science theories or economic theories. It is “what is this like that has happened in the past”.