Sarah Doudney Quotes

I had learned one of the bitter lessons of life: never try to regain the past, the fire will have become ashes.

The mill cannot grind with the water that has passed.

The mill cannot grind with the water that is past.

Don't let yesterday use up too much of today.

There's no future in spending our present worrying about our past.

Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.

It isn't good to hold on too hard to the past. You can't spend your whole life looking back. Not even when you can't see what lies ahead. All you can do is keep on keeping on, and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should be—even if it isn't what you expected.

Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink.

Keep in mind that people change, but the past doesn't.

Every second you dwell on the past you steal from your future. Every minute you spend focusing on your problems you take away from finding your solutions.

Regret is useless in life. It's in the past. All we have is now.

A man is a fool who sits looking backward from himself in the past. Ah, what shallow, vain conceit there is in man! Forget the things that are behind. That is not where you live. Your roots are not there. They are in the present; and you should reach up into the other life.

The past is a sorry country.

We ought to remember the past, yes -- but we shouldn't allow it to consume us. We live in the present moment, and some people are too tied to the ideals of that period to fully move forward. We'll never work through the future unless we accept the present. We must fill the twenty-first century with dreams.

Things are what they are and there's no point dwelling in the past or wondering what could have been.

Look not mournfully into the past. It comes not back again.

Don´t be unnecessarily burdened by the past. Go on closing the chapters that you have read; there is no need to go back again and again. And never judge anything of the past from the new perspective that is arriving, because the new is new, incomparably new and the old was right in its own context, and the new is right in its own context.

Don't miss out on today by living in yesterday.

Don't beat yourself up over what you could have or should have done. The past is gone. Move on to the future.

Sometime we get so addicted to murmuring about the past and blaming the past for everything that we miss our whole future. You're not going to enjoy your future, and you're not going to enjoy your right now, if all you can do is be guilty and ashamed and afraid of your past.

If you try to live that which is past, that which IS will bypass you.

...why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?

These are things you should learn. Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you; your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don’t wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is. Now, these skeletons are made of memories, dreams, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they’re not necessarily evil, unless you let them be.

If you're busy regretting the past, then a new future can't come in.

The present only is a man's possession; the past is gone out of his hand wholly, irrevocably. He may suffer from it, learn from it,--in degree, perhaps, expiate it; but to brood over it is utter madness.