Marcus Aurelius Quotes

Look to the past and remember no empire rises that sooner or later won't fall.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.

A feeling for history is almost an essential for writing and appreciating good science fiction, for sensing the connections between the past and future that run through our present.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

Ere we can forecast the future we must understand the present and bring a just sense of proportion to our review of the history of the past.

The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

The further backward we look, the further forward we are likely to see.

It is only by reflecting on the past that one can create a better future.

The past is the present and the future too.

[Addressing Thomas Jefferson:] Your taste is judicious in liking better the dreams of the future than the history of the past.

But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok'd souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will.

If we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall be in danger of losing our future.

We are products of the past and its useful to remember that as we move into the future.

The now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.

We have to go into the past to go further and further into the future.

I don’t like trying to predict the future. I am a historian. I have enough trouble predicting the past.

What happened yesterday affects today; what happens today will affect tomorrow/

History is written not only for posterity but by posterity as well.

Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present. Fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.