150+ Best Ever Nostalgia Quotes To Go Back In Time

Why Nostalgia Quotes?

Nostalgia is a sentimental yearning for the past, usually for a time or location that has pleasant personal memories. It was created in the 17th century by a medical student to describe the fears Swiss mercenaries exhibited when fighting far from home.

The word nostalgia is a learned combination of two Greek words, nóstos (return) and álgos (pain).

Nostalgia takes us back and lets us relive the memories of the past. If you often feel like you would go back in time when you get the chance, some nostalgia quotes might be just what you need.

What Parents Should Know

• Intriguingly, nostalgia can be aroused by other things besides hearing a favorite song or seeing a childhood home. Nostalgia is strongest through fragrance. In the early 1900s, famous neurologist Sigmund Freud linked to smell and emotion.
• While nostalgia may be nothing more than a strange, uplifting feeling, it significantly influences judgment. A person always wishes to bring their joyful past experiences to the present while experiencing nostalgia.
• Because it helps people avoid loneliness and anxiety by bringing back memories, nostalgia might even help those with depression. 

What To Discuss With Kids

• People can highly benefit from nostalgia.
• At the Chicago Shopping Center at Water Tower Place, scientists experimented in 1991 with consenting subjects who were chosen at random.
• A person always wishes to bring their joyful past experiences to the present while experiencing nostalgia.

1. “Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.” - Doug Larson

2. “True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.” - Florence King

3. “Nostalgia has become so much more popular because technology and climate change are visibly present. It's easy to idolize the past, before those things were prevalent.” - Weyes Blood

4. “In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.” - Brooks Atkinson

5. “You can embrace nostalgia and history and tradition at the same time - it has to progress or it can't survive.” - Sturgill Simpson

6. “I remember the old Times Square from when I was younger, and there was a seedy thrill to it. Some of that is gone, which I have a little bit of nostalgia for.” - Janeane Garofalo

7. “We grow up with dreams in our eyes and songs on our lips and we discover that life is not what we thought it would be. And then, we discover nostalgia.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

8. “Nostalgia, the vice of the aged.” - Angela Carter

9. “I went through a phase where I thought nostalgia was a bad thing.” - Dario Argento

10. “The problem with relying on nostalgia for commentary is that people only remember the good things.” – Richie Benaud, 'Interview With Jim White, August 5, 2001'

11. “I still felt fondness for her - fondness, that pleasant, detached mix of admiration and sentiment, appreciation and nostalgia.” - David Levithan, 'Dash & Lily's Book Of Dares'

12. “I'm not into nostalgia, and I only look back to find lessons.” - Ian Schrager

13. “Nostalgia: A device that removes the ruts and potholes from memory lane.” - Doug Larson

14. “Ok, fine maybe I'm just a little nostalgic

'Cause the memories are flooding my mind.” - Arizona, 'Nostalgic'

15. “The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.” - Amy Bloom, 'Away'

16. “It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.” - Ally Condie, 'Matched'

17. “There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.” - Shannon L. Alder

18. “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence. The future is the only transcendental value for men without God.” - Albert Camus, 'The Rebel'

19. “How sad and bad and mad it was -

But then, how it was sweet!” - Robert Browning, 'Confessions'

20. “I tend not to fathom the best times of my life until they are gone.” – Lidia Longorio, 'Hey Humanity'

21. “I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom.” – Will Self

22. “Nostalgic memory is a sudden encounter with the thingness of the thing that has been forgotten, not the continuous desire for possessions, whether past, present, or future.” – Marjorie Garber

23. “At some point in your childhood, you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and nobody knew it.” – Unknown*

24. “Once I left home, I finally understood how to define nostalgia.” - Unknown*

25. “Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.” – Novalis

26. “Remember when I was young and so were you And time stood still and love was all we knew…” – Alan Jackson, 'Remember When'

27. “The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mixtape.

It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.” – Rob Sheffield

28. “There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook.” – David Benioff, 'When The Nines Roll Over And Other Stories'

29. “Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.” – Mary Schmich, 'Wear Sunscreen: A Primer For Real Life'

30. “This feeling is nostalgic yet so new. I’m in love, but this time it’s not you.

I craved for this tickle in my belly, long before the butterflies flew. I’m feeling their renascence, fluttering in bliss, reliving the adrenaline rush in the blood, and raising the goosebumps from the skin. But phew, this time it’s not you.” - Unknown*

31. “I'm not a very nostalgic person. I don't really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations.” – Leonard Cohen

32.

“At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.” – J. K. Rowling, 'Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits Of Failure And The Importance Of Imagination'

33. “I'm a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change.” – Stacy Schiff

34. “I get emotional when young people get nostalgic about my work. That’s why it’s called nostalgia. Sometimes I even cry.” – Mithun Chakraborty

35. “My dream is for my show to be nostalgia act. So the key to it is how do we keep it fresh?” – Joan Baez

36. “No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed.” – Rabih Alameddine, 'An Unnecessary Woman'

37. “Nobody could understand the past except the people from it.” – Vera Jane Cook, 'Lies A River Deep'

38. “We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.” – Sophocles, 'Oedipus At Colonus'

39. “What seems real one moment is fiction the next and gone out of existence the moment after that. Nostalgia is the greatest enemy of truth, and change our only constancy.” – David Budbill

40. “When the word ‘nostalgia’ was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology – not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.” – Nicole Krauss, 'Have A Heart', 'Interview With Gaby Wood, May 14, 2005'

41. “Feeling nostalgic about the days spent with best mates. I wish that their memories from my mind never fades, their friendship showed me lovely life shades, missing those faces who turned my bad days into great days.” - Unknown*

42. “Feeling nostalgic is cool but getting hit by nostalgia is fabulous!!” - Unknown*

43. “For me as a solo artist, I never want to be a nostalgia act.” – Bret Michaels

44. “For me, food is all about nostalgia. Anyone who's been an usher knows it's a training in resilience. But you get such a film education. And the popcorn's free.” – Zawe Ashton

45. “I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them.” – Andy, 'The Office'

The Best Nostalgia Quotes And Sayings

46. “I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.” - Kris Kristofferson

47. “There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves.” - Joe L. Wheeler

48.“Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.” - Orhan Pamuk, 'The Museum Of Innocence'

49. “Cash is going to be killed. It will be nostalgia.” - Tyler Winklevoss

50. “I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.” - Vikram Seth, 'From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang And Tibet'

51. “We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.” - Lois McMaster Bujold, 'Diplomatic Immunity'

52. “Each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories.” - Jerry Spinelli, 'Love, Stargirl'

53. “There are no days more full than those we go back to.” - Colum McCann, 'Zoli'

54. “Nostalgia is the only friend that stays with you forever.” - Damien Echols, 'Life After Death'

55. “There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time when miserable.”  - Dante Alighieri

56. “Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had, for the first involves knowledge and pleasure, the second only ignorance and pain.” - Mignon McLaughlin, 'The Complete Neurotic's Notebook'

57. “To return to the books of my childhood is to yield to the strain of nostalgia that is curious about the self I once was.” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 'Rereading Albert Speer’s “Inside the Third Reich”'

58. “You can't return to a place that no longer exists, luv.” - Samantha Sotto, 'Before Ever After'

59. “It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life.”  - W. Somerset Maugham, 'Of Human Bondage'

60. “I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.” - Robert Wyatt

61. “When we are young... we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now.” - Edmund White, 'City Boy: My Life In New York In The 1960s And 70s'

62. “Nostalgia is a very human trait.” - Stephanie Coontz

63. “Nostalgia is simply the result of aging and liking the life you've lived. Be happy you can feel it it's a good sign.” - Anthony Marais

64. “Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind.

It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness--the ache of the uprooted plant.” - Stephen King

65. “Scents bring memories, and many memories bring nostalgic pleasure. We would be wise to plan for this when we plant a garden.” - Thalassa Cruso, 'The Gardening Year'

66. “This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family.” - John Thorn

67. "Oh heavens, how I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm. Just enthusiasm -- that's all." - John Osborne, 'Look Back In Anger'

68. "One day, when I'm not longer spending my days running a sweet-stall, I may write a book about us all... It'll be recollected in fire, and blood. My blood." - John Osborne, 'Look Back In Anger'

69. "You want a timeless song, I wanna change the game...

... You wanna turn it up loud, future nostalgia is the name." - Dua Lipa, 'Future Nostalgia'

70. “People seem to get nostalgic about a lot of things they weren’t so crazy about the first time around.” - Unknown*

71. “People underestimate the power of nostalgia. Nostalgia is truly one of the greatest human weaknesses, second only to the neck.” – Dwight Schrute, 'The Office'

72. “But every season is a kind of rich nostalgia. We give names – autumn and summer, winter, spring – as though to unfasten from the mind our moods and give them outward forms. We want the certain, solid thing.” – Elizabeth Jennings

73. “Here’s the truth of nostalgia: we don’t feel it for who we were but who we weren’t, we feel it for all the possibilities that were open to us but that we didn’t take.” – Joseph Fink, 'Mostly Void, Partially Stars'

74. “But in that moment I understood what they say about nostalgia, that no matter if you’re thinking of something good or bad, it always leaves you a little emptier afterward.” – John Corey Whaley, 'Noggin'

75. “Can you miss someone you haven’t seen for longer than you knew them? Maybe we rue the time, not the person.” – Hannah Rothschild, 'House Of Trelawney'

76. “I have an unhealthy fixation with nostalgia.” - Unknown*

77. “I joke that a person of color would never make a movie like ‘Midnight in Paris’. Nostalgia isn’t so enticing.” – Meshell Ndegeocello

78. “I love the nostalgic myself. I hope we never lose some of the things of the past.” – Walt Disney

79. “I love those random memories that make me smile no matter what is going on in my life right now.” - Unknown*

80. “I noticed in the late 1990s that my friends and I were already nostalgic for the 1980s, and by the turn of the century, VH1’s ‘I Love the ’80s’ gave all of us an accelerated nostalgia for our generation.” – Ernest Cline

81. “And, I feel nostalgic sometimes, for the people who never belonged to me, for the places I’ve never been to!” - Unknown*

82. “As I’ve gotten older I’ve occasionally found myself nostalgic for earlier periods of solitude, though I realize that’s also likely a false nostalgia, as I know there was nothing I wanted more during those periods than to not be alone, whatever that means.” – Chris Ware

83. “Nostalgia embraces while watching our juniors living their college lives.” - Unknown*

84. “It’s not regret for staying. It is nostalgia for something that we believe is true in our illusion, something we will never have. And if we touched it, we would soon realize that it was not what we dreamed of.” – Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu, 'الساعة الخامسة والعشرون'

85. “I’ll take a one-way ticket back to the ’90s, please.” - Unknown*

86. “He loves what he’s done, but I hate cages, and sometimes nostalgia is a cage.” - André Benjamin

87. “Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” – Dr. Seuss

88. “I spent my whole childhood wishing I were older, and now I’m spending my adulthood wishing I were younger.” - Unknown*

89. “I've always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for.” – Lena Dunham

90. “Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isn’t what it used to be?” – Jasper Fforde, 'First Among Sequels'

91. “Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia.” – James Wolcott

92. “Everyone wants to live in tomorrow and vacation in yesterday.” – Matt Spire, 'Caligatha'

93. “Fashion is inspired by youth and nostalgia and draws inspiration from the past of the past.” – Lana Del Rey

94. “Feeling nostalgic about my childhood summers, when we would climb into old tires and roll down the hills.” - Unknown*

95. “I don’t have a great nostalgia for the past.” – Andy Summers, 'Andy Summer The Police Interview', 'Interview with Paul Cashmere, April 25, 2016'

96. “Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.” – Robert Morgan

97. “In personal life, the warm glow of nostalgia amplifies good memories and minimizes bad ones about experiences and relationships, encouraging us to revisit and renew our ties with friends and family. It always involves a little harmless self-deception, like forgetting the pain of childbirth.” – Stephanie Coontz

98. “Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different?” – C.S. Lewis

99. “It becomes increasingly easy, as you get older, to drown in nostalgia.” – Ted Koppel

100. “Maybe that’s the definition of nostalgia: getting sappy about things that are supposed to be insignificant.” – Rachel Lynn Solomon, 'Today Tonight Tomorrow'

101. “Memories stay forever; people don’t…” - Unknown*

102. “Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.” – Angela Carter

103. “The best times we’ve had on earth are usually with those we love.” – Van Harden, 'Life In the Purple Wedge!'

Rip Van Winkle Nostalgia Quotes

104. "He used to tell his story to every stranger that arrived at Mr. Doolittle's hotel... It at last settled down precisely to the tale I have related, and not a man, woman, or child in the neighborhood, but knew it by heart."

105. “Having nothing to do at home, and being arrived at that happy age when a man can be idle with impunity, he took his place once more on the bench at the inn door, and was reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times 'before the war.'”

106. “Rip's heart died away at hearing of these sad changes in his home and friends, and finding himself thus alone in the world.”

107. “His mind now misgave him; began to doubt whether both he and the world around him were not bewitched.” 

108. “Times grew worse and worse with Rip Van Winkle as years of matrimony rolled on; a tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.”

109. “Rip... marveled greatly what could be the object of carrying a keg of liquor up this wild mountain, yet... something strange... inspired awe.”

Inspirational Nostalgia Quotes

110. “Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you. ” - Jonathan Safran Foer

111. "How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.” - Milan Kundera, 'Identity'

112. “The Greek word for 'return' is nostos. Algos means 'suffering'. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” - Milan Kundera, 'Ignorance'

113. “That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.” - A. E. Housman

114. “Music can be a way for me to think back a lot of the time, almost like an opening into all the nostalgia I never express.” - Amber Mark

115. "No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me... And suddenly the memory revealed itself." - Marcel Proust, 'In Remembrance Of Lost Time'

116. “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity.” - Jean Baudrillard

117. “... and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like a sudden hunger.” - Margaret Atwood, 'Oryx And Crake'

118. “The 'good old times' - all times when old are good.” - Lord Byron

119. “You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.” - John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'

120. “To get nostalgic about other people’s music, or even about your own, makes a terrible statement about the condition of your life and your prospects for the future.” – Neil Peart

Nostalgia Quotes By William Shakespeare

121. “I summon up remembrance of things past.” - ‘Sonnet 30’

122. “Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent!

And to see how many of my old acquaintance are dead!” - 'Henry IV' (Part II)

123. “For you and I are past our dancing days.” - 'Romeo And Juliet'.

124. “What's gone, and what's past help, Should be past grief.” - ‘The Winter's Tale'

125. “Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had Past reason hated.” - ‘Sonnet 129’

126. “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.” - ‘Sonnet 30’

127. “When remedies are past, the griefs are ended

By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended.” - ‘Othello’

128. “What's past and what's to come is strew'd with husks

And formless ruin of oblivion.” - ‘Troilus And Cressida’

129. “To mourn a mischief that is past and gone Is the next way to draw new mischief on.” - ‘Othello’

130. “Things past redress are now with me past care.” - 'Richard II’

Bible Quotes On Nostalgia

131. “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth;

And the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” - Isaiah, 65:17

132. “In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions in his mind as he lay on his bed; then he wrote the dream down and related the following summary of it.” - Daniel, 7:1

133. “Don't long for the good old days. This is not wise.” - Ecclesiastes 7:10

134. "Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." - 2 Corinthians, 5:17

Nostalgia Criticism Quotes

135. “Music evokes so many feelings in us, memories, nostalgia, things that are connected to our past.” - Olga Kurylenko

136. “Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.” - John Green

137. “We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.” - Carson McCullers

138.

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops.

What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?” - George Eliot, 'The Mill On The Floss'

139. “It's never safe to be nostalgic about something until you're absolutely certain there's no chance of its coming back.” - Bill Vaughan

140. “It's curious the way we get nostalgic for some hoped-for thing that never happened, as if something that never happened were in the past.” - Robert Breault

141. “Nobody said it was easy, no one ever said it would be this hard. Oh take me back to the start!” - Coldplay, 'The Scientist'

142. “We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today.

I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.” - Art Buchwald

143. “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” - André Gide

144. “I just really gravitate towards a nostalgia for a time when things were simpler. When beauty was more classical and glamorous.” - Emmy Rossum

145. “Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...” - William Faulkner, 'The Sound And The Fury'

146. “There's too much rock that relies on... nostalgia for the old ways. That's a real enemy to music.” - Matt Tong

147. “Nostalgia is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish.

At the same time, if nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time, particularly in one who believes his life to be a failure, then it is an empty thing, doomed to produce nothing but frustration and an even greater sense of failure.” - R A Salvatore, 'Stream Of Silver'

148. “A lot of people do that kind of nostalgia stuff believing that they were very happy in their teenage years, but that's probably just an illusion.” - Jo Brand

149. “When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness. I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell.” - Nicole Krauss

Remember When Nostalgia Quotes

150. “Certain scents can evoke so much feeling, nostalgia, and trigger beautiful memories.” - Kat Von D

151. “Life is so fast. And I still remember when I came up to the big leagues and played as if it were yesterday. Time flies." - Asdrubal Cabrera

152. “Nostalgia paints a smile on the stony face of the past.” - Mason Cooley

153. “Nostalgia is an illness for those who haven't realized that today is tomorrow's nostalgia.” - Zeena Schreck

154.

“I remember when I was a child at Coolin or Sagle or Talache, walking into the woods by myself and feeling the solitude around me build like electricity and pass through my body with a jolt that made my hair prickle.

I remember kneeling by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakably tender growth of small trees already sprouting from their backs, and thinking, there is only one thing wrong here, which is my own presence, and that is the slightest imaginable intrusion - feeling that my solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a place.” - Marilynne Robinson, 'When I Was A Child I Read Books'

155. “Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were.” - Roxane Gay, 'Bad Feminist'

156. “The deeper the nostalgia and the more complete the fear, the purer, the richer the word and the secret.” - Elie Wiesel, 'Legends Of Our Time'

157. “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” - Franklin Pierce Adams

158. “Unreal. I'm feeling nostalgic for something that happened less than twenty-four hours ago. This has got to be a record.” - Barry Lyga

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