Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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

Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.

We are sons of yesterday, not of the morning. The past is our mortal mother, no dead thing. Our future constantly reflects her to the soul.

The past can influence the future. When you finish one chapter, you open another, which will be influenced by what you've just lived through.

The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.

The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

Man is a history—making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

The past has a lobby …; the future does not have a lobby.

Our goal is to move forward, but we know that to avoid falling backward, we must be willing to look backward and to come to terms with what happened in the past.

Our pasts so many times determine the value of what is happening today. Everybody is midway in their story.

That's the best thing that classic can do, is it can return to us from our own past to give us lessons about the future, and it can give us a sense of both who we were and who we could become.

History provides a sense of where we've been and lessons that can be taken forward.

The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.

In my view, you can't go to the future if you haven't come from the past.

Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future - that's fabulous.

The past is what the past is.

The past has infinite value if one learns from it.

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.

We, who are the living, possess the past. Tomorrow is for our martyrs.

They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.

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

The past is where its supposed to be.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.