“There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.”

— Siri Hustvedt , book The Summer Without Men

Source: The Summer Without Men

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Siri Hustvedt 8

novelist, essayist, poet 1955

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“Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.”

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Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

“If you could not accept the past and its burden, there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and […] if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.”

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“Truth is not of the past or the present, it is timeless; the man who quotes the truth of the Buddha, of Shankara, of Christ, or who merely repeats what I am saying, will not find truth, because repetition is not truth. Repetition is a lie.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

"Fifth Talk in Bombay 1950 (12 March 1950) http://www.jkrishnamurti.com/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?tid=352&chid=4672&w=%22Truth+is+not+something+in+the+distance%22, J.Krishnamurti Online, JKO Serial No. 500312, The Collected Works, Vol. VI, p. 134
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works
Context: Truth is not something in the distance; there is no path to it, there is neither your path nor my path; there is no devotional path, there is no path of knowledge or path of action, because truth has no path to it. The moment you have a path to truth, you divide it, because the path is exclusive; and what is exclusive at the very beginning will end in exclusiveness. The man who is following a path can never know truth because he is living in exclusiveness; his means are exclusive, and the means are the end, are not separate from the end. If the means are exclusive, the end is also exclusive. So there is no path to truth, and there are not two truths. Truth is not of the past or the present, it is timeless; the man who quotes the truth of the Buddha, of Shankara, of Christ, or who merely repeats what I am saying, will not find truth, because repetition is not truth. Repetition is a lie.

“What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.”

George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion

Source: Pygmalion

“There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.”

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

This is sometimes attributed to Augustine, but the earliest known occurrence is in Persian Rosary (c. 1929) by Ahmad Sohrab (PDF) http://magshare.net/narchive/NArchive/Misc/Raw_Data/A_Persian_Rosary_by_Mirza_Ahmad_Sohrab.pdf, which probably originates as a paraphrase of a statement in Oscar Wilde's 1893 play A Woman of No Importance: "The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."
Misattributed