Past Longing Quotes

There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

If there is a next life, I hope it's in the past; I don't think the future will be any more handleable. I think it's a little harsh how the END button is red.

I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.

Never let success hide its emptiness from you, achievement its nothingness, toil its desolation. And so...keep alive the incentive to push on further, that pain in the soul which drives us beyond ourselves...Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward - your destiny - are here and now.

We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.

That is how you know you've left childhood behind-when you wish for time to go backward.

No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.