Eugene O'Neill Quotes

The past is the present and the future too.

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

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

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

My future is in my past and my past is my present. I must now make the present my future.

The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

What happens today can affect what happens tomorrow, but it cannot affect what happened yesterday.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect is already in the cause.

The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

The Past, The Present, For the Future

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

Events are as much the parents of the future as they were the children of the past.

Never has the future become so rapidly the past.

I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.