Reference > Quotations > Hoyt & Roberts, comps. > Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations
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Hoyt & Roberts, comps.  Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations.  1922.
 
Past
 
  Therefore Agathon rightly says: “Of this alone even God is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been.”
        Aristotle—Ethics. Bk. VI. Ch. II. R. W. Browne’s trans. Same idea in Milton—Paradise Lost. 9. 926. Pindar—Olympia. 2. 17. Pliny the Elder—Historia Naturalis. 2. 5. 10.		  1
  The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
        Henri Bergson—Creative Evolution. Ch. I.		  2
No traces left of all the busy scene,
But that remembrances says: The things have been.
        Samuel Boyse—The Deity.		  3
But how carve way i’ the life that lies before,
If bent on groaning ever for the past?
        Robert Browning—Balaustion’s Adventure.		  4
Thou unrelenting past.
        Bryant—To the Past.		  5
The light of other days is faded,
And all their glories past.
        Alfred Bunn—The Maid of Artois.		  6
The age of chivalry is gone.
        Burke—Reflections on the Revolution in France.		  7
John Anderson, my jo, John,
  When we were first acquent,
Your locks were like the raven,
  Your bonny brow was brent.
        Burns—John Anderson.		  8
  Gone—glimmering through the dream of things that were.
        Byron—Childe Harold. Canto II. St. 2.		  9
The best of prophets of the future is the past.
        Byron—Letter. Jan. 28, 1821.		  10
  The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.
        Carlyle—Essays. Characteristics.		  11
O, to bring back the great Homeric time,
The simple manners and the deeds sublime:
When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate,
Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight.
        Mortimer Collins—Letter to the Rt. Hon. B. Disraeli, M. P. Pub. anon. 1869. “Ploughing his lonely furrow.” Used by Lord Rosebery. July, 1901.		  12
Listen to the Water-Mill:
  Through the live-long day
How the clicking of its wheel
  Wears the hours away!
Languidly the Autumn wind
  Stirs the forest leaves,
From the field the reapers sing
  Binding up their sheaves:
And a proverb haunts my mind
  As a spell is cast,
“The mill cannot grind
  With the water that is past.”
        Sarah Doudney—Lesson of the Water-Mill.		  13
Not heaven itself upon the past has power;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
        Dryden—Imitation of Horace. Bk. III. Ode XXIX. L. 71.		  14
Ils sont passés ces jours de fête.
  The days of rejoicing are gone forever.
        Du Lorens—Le Tableau Parlant.		  15
Oh le bon temps où étions si malheureux.
  Oh! the good times when we were so unhappy.
        Dumas—Le Chevalier d’Harmental. II. 318.		  16
Un jeune homme d’un bien beau passé.
  A young man with a very good past.
        Heine of Alfred de Musset. Quoted by Swinburne—Miscellanies. P. 233.		  17
O Death! O Change! O Time!
Without you, O! the insufferable eyes
Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
These fatuous, ineffectual yesterdays.
        Henley—Rhymes and Rhythms. XIII.		  18
Praise they that will times past, I joy to see
My selfe now live: this age best pleaseth mee.
        Herrick—The Present Time Best Pleaseth.		  19
  O God! Put back Thy universe and give me yesterday.
        Henry Arthur Jones—Silver King.		  20
 
 
  Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
        Charles Kingsley—Life. Vol. II. Ch. XXVIII.		  21
Enjoy the spring of love and youth,
  To some good angel leave the rest;
For time will teach thee soon the truth,
  There are no birds in last year’s nest.
        Longfellow—It is not always May.		  22
                We remain
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past.
        Lowell—The Cathedral. L. 234.		  23
Prisca juvent alios; ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor.
  The good of other times let people state;
  I think it lucky I was born so late.
        Ovid—Ars Amatoria. III. 121. Trans. by Sydney Smith.		  24
Weep no more, lady, weep no more,
  Thy sorrowe is in vaine,
For violets pluckt, the sweetest showers
  Will ne’er make grow againe.
        Thos. Percy—Reliques. The Friar of Orders Gray. See Fletcher—The Queen of Corinth. Act III. Sc. 2.		  25
O there are Voices of the Past,
  Links of a broken chain,
Wings that can bear me back to Times
  Which cannot come again;
Yet God forbid that I should lose
  The echoes that remain!
        Adelaide A. Procter—Voices of the Past.		  26
  In tanta inconstantia turbaque rerum nihil nisi quod preteriit certum est.
  In the great inconstancy and crowd of events, nothing is certain except the past.
        Seneca—De Consolatione ad Marciam. XXII.		  27
What’s past is prologue.
        Tempest. Act II. Sc. 1. L. 253.		  28
The past Hours weak and gray
With the spoil which their toil
    Raked together
  From the conquest but One could foil.
        Shelley—Prometheus Unbound. Act IV. Sc. 1.		  29
I need not ask thee if that hand, now calmed,
  Has any Roman soldier mauled and knuckled,
For thou wert dead, and buried and embalmed,
  Ere Romulus and Remus had been suckled:
Antiquity appears to have begun
Long after that primeval race was run.
        Horace Smith—Address to the Mummy in Belzoni’s Exhibition.		  30
Oh, had I but Aladdin’s lamp
  Tho’ only for a day,
I’d try to find a link to bind
  The joys that pass away.
        Charles Swain—Oh, Had I but Aladdin’s Lamp.		  31
The eternal landscape of the past.
        Tennyson—In Memoriam. Pt. XLVI.		  32
Oh seize the instant time; you never will
With waters once passed by impel the mill.
        Trench—Poems. (Ed. 1865). P. 303. Proverbs, Turkish and Persian.		  33
  Many a woman has a past; but I am told she has at least a dozen, and that they all fit.
        Oscar Wilde—Lady Windermere’s Fan. Act I. A Woman with a Past. Title of a Novel by Mrs. Berens. Pub. 1886.		  34
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.
        Wordsworth—Ode. Intimations of Immortality. St. 10.		  35
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.
        Wordsworth—The Solitary Reaper.		  36
That awful independent on to-morrow!
Whose work is done; who triumphs in the past;
Whose yesterdays look backward with a smile
Nor, like the Parthian, wound him as they fly.
        Young—Night Thoughts. Night II. L. 322.		  37
 
 
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