“Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.”

“Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.”

“We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that’s of no use to the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It’s always new.”

“God is in the résumé-building business. He is always using past experiences to prepare us for future opportunities.”

“The past has lost, as it always loses; the future has won, as it always wins.”

“Reality is always the story of a past, and what I love about the past is—it’s over.”

“We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.”

“The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.”

“I've always tried to go a step past wherever people expected me to end up. I'm not about to change now.”

“some of us have so much defeat in our past that we feel we lost the race before we knew it started.”