William Dean Howells Quotes

You can't go feeding your hate on the past, it's not natural.

There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there.

The past is history. I can't change any of that.

You simply cannot change what has happened in the past.

If I could undo what's been done, But I guess everyone is living, With water and bridges.

Learning from our mistakes is critical for improving, but even I don't have patience for ranking my regrets. Regret is a negative emotion that inhibits the optimism required to take on new challenges. You risk living in an alternative universe, where if only you had done this or that differently, things would be better. That's a poor substitute for making your actual life better, or improving the lives of others. Regret briefly, analyze and understand, and then move on, improving the only life you have.

The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past.

Suffering over things that have happened to us is nothing more than an argument with the past.

I try to not go over things from the past. Learn your lessons and then let it go.

Well. Like I said, I dont want to fight anymore. I dont want us to hate each other. And ... well ... I squeezed my eyes shut and then opened them. No matter how I fee about us ... I want you to be happy

I once read that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past...but forgiving is not the same as obliterating memory.

The past is a sorry country.

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.

Because we cling to the past we become unavailable to the present.

We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.

Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do. Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it. Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others. Don't assume that it's too late to get involved.

Without anyone's help, Darth Maul will only commit himself to his mistakes of the past. Every time we find this character, he is living in the past and in some cases he is living with the dead. This character is desperate and he needs Obi-Wan's help to move on.

People spend thousands in therapy digging and digging in the past. When you dig and dig, you find relics. Try to forgive yourself and get back on that ride.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

I try to give as much blanket forgiveness as much as possible in my life because that's the only way you can get past things and move forward. But, conversely, I'd like to be forgiven. In many ways, that's the bigger leap, the bigger transformation and the bigger step forward.

We cannot erase the past, but we can accept it as history.

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

When you don't flow freely with life in the present moment, it usually means that you're holding on to a past moment. It can be regret, sadness, hurt, fear, guilt, blame, anger, resentment, or sometimes even a desire for revenge. Each one of these states comes from a space of unforgiveness, a refusal to let go and come into the present moment. Only in the present moment can you create your future.

Having looked the past in the eye, having asked for forgiveness and having made amends, let us shut the door on the past—not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it to imprison us.

Don't put your life on hold so that you can dwell on the unfairness of past hurts.