Past Experience Quotes

No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

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

You can't base your life on the past or the present. You have to tell me about your future.

It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides.

The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.

You can't really know where you are going until you know where you have been.

By how much one man has more experience of things past, than another, by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him.

Your whole past is like a long sleep which would have been forgotten had there been no memory, but remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which everything is washed away but that which is new and more substantial even than life - reality.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

I write a lot about the past because I really see things clearly in hindsight.

Where you come from does matter -- but not nearly as much as where you are headed.

You can never plan the future by the past.

I think there's value in experience and observations that link past to present.

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

We ought not to look back, unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience.

I would go back to the past and watch one of the early Beatles shows, because they were such a massive part of cultural history. As a younger person, you feel you missed out on that.

We ought not to look back, unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience. To enveigh against things that are past and irremediable, is unpleasing; but to steer clear of the shelves and rocks we have struck upon, is the part of wisdom, equally as incumbent on political as other men, who have their own little bark, or that of others, to navigate through the intricate paths of life, or the trackless ocean, to the haven of security and rest.

Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

You can't move forward until you look back.

I do not fear it: I have been there.

YESTERDAY, n. The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire past of age.

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