# Yesterday

Yesterday is a temporal construct of the relative past; literally of the day before the current day (today), or figuratively of earlier periods or times, often but not always within living memory.

## Quotes

* Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away Now it looks as though they're here to stay Oh, I believe in yesterday.
** The Beatles, "Yesterday", Help! (1965).
* Why she had to go I don't know She wouldn't say. I said something wrong, Now I long for yesterday.
** The Beatles, "Yesterday", Help! (1965).
* YESTERDAY, n. The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire past of age.
** Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911).
* Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ. Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.
** Oswald Chambers My Utmost for His Highest (1956). Section "December 31".
* O Death! O Change! O Time! Without you, O! the insufferable eyes Of these poor Might-Have-Beens, These fatuous, ineffectual yesterdays.
** William Ernest Henley, Rhymes and Rhythms, XIII.
* O God! Put back Thy universe and give me yesterday.
** Henry Arthur Jones, Silver King.
* Thank God, my name isn't in the list of those who died or were killed yesterday!
** Suman Pokhrel, Every Morning
* One world and then another, running like a chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just ahead. One world's tomorrow, another world's today. And yesterday is tomorrow, and tomorrow is the past.
** Clifford D. Simak, City (1952), Chapter 7, "Aesop", p. 195-196.
* That awful independent on to-morrow! Whose work is done; who triumphs in the past; Whose yesterdays look backward with a smile Nor, like the Parthian, wound him as they fly.
** Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night II, line 322.

## Misattributed

* Oogway: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the "present".
** Jonathan Aibel and Glen Berger, Kung Fu Panda, (2008).
*** "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, Today is God's gift, that's why we call it the present." (Regarded as an "anonymous poem", in Joan Chittister's Heart of Flesh (1998), p. 129; in Vital Issues: The Journal of African American Speeches (1998), Bethune-DuBois Publications, p. 27, and in Joan Rivers' "From Mother to Daughter" (1998), p. 30.)
*** "Yesterday may be History, Tomorrow is Mystery and Today is our Golden Opportunity!" (As quoted in H.S. Cheesbrough's Canada Lumberman, Volume 62 (1942), Southam-Maclean.
*** "Live today. The past is gone. Today is God's gift to us, whether it be a day of storm or sunshine. Tomorrow may never come, and that is immaterial." (From Friends' Intelligencer, Volume 91, No.1-26 (1934), p. 21)
*** "Yesterday is history; to-morrow is merely a hope; to-day is the only absolute asset of time that is yours." From Frank Pixley's Thoughts and Things (1912), in , Duffield & Company, p. 29.

## See also

* Future
* History
* Past
* Present