Having A Past Quotes

#1. To lead a human life, a man must have a notion of himself as having a past and a future.

Mary Warnock

#2. Don't think of yourself as having a past, don't think of yourself as having a future. What's left?

Eckhart Tolle

#3. Deborah and I went in past a sculpture that looked like a geometry lesson having sex in a hardware bin and we walked straight to the back, where a door announced, DR. J. LONOFF, DDS: COSMETIC DENTISTRY.

Jeff Lindsay

#4. We're long past having to defend or explain why women should be on boards, given all the data that shows how companies with female as well as male directors perform better. It's unfortunate when companies with a large percentage of women constituents don't reflect that in their boardrooms.

Anne M. Mulcahy

#5. In religion, India is the only millionaire ... the One land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.

Mark Twain

#6. I worry about children not having a sense of any direct connection to the past.

Mal Peet

#7. First of all, I would shoot myself if I ever had to play straight-forward characters that really don't have much of a past. Maybe it's just that I'm not a good enough actor to have to embellish, but I like having these really, really rich roles to play.

Drea De Matteo

#8. The Saudis have never shown any respect for human rights, either now or in the past. Even a petty burglar faces having one of his hands chopped off. The liberal press in America prefers to ignore all this, although they don't hesitate to blacken the reputation of Iran.

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

#9. And I'm hoping that fair-minded people will stand up and say that what's been done to me is wrong, and that-that people's personal lives have no impact on their ability to be a journalist, you know. Why should my past prevent me from having a future?

Jeff Gannon

#10. I regret having helped you clarify your past and having told you what I did.'
'Why?'
'Because I've instilled in your heart a feeling that wasn't there before: vengeance.

Alexandre Dumas

#11. He cannot deny a certain relief in being able to sift through academic tomes, fulfilling his journalistic duty without having to barge past security guards at the Arab League or grab man-on-the-street from women at the market. This library work is easily his favorite part of reporting so far.

Tom Rachman

#12. In the past, having a life while earning a living didn't seem like too much to ask. Today, even this basic goal has been redefined as 'having it all.

Sally Helgesen

#13. just about every human being can reflect on his or her past and say, 'I learned from that hardship. I didn't think I would at the time, but I'm a bigger and better person for having endured it and persevered.

Lee Strobel

#14. When you strip away the rhetoric, preservation is simply having the good sense to hold on to things that are well designed, that link us with our past in a meaningful way, and that have plenty of good use left in them.

Richard Moe

#15. If you are having a tough time today, push past those boundaries, because by challenging your fears
today will become the strength you feel tomorrow ... DO WHAT YOU FEAR, DON'T FEAR WHAT YOU DO.

Hrithik Roshan

#16. I'm beginning to see that just knowing the piece is not enough. Having a clear technique is not enough. Having a broad repertory is not enough. I want desperately to get past all those things.

Leonard Slatkin

#17. There was a sense of being in the midst of something having prodigious weight and volume but no form, of being utterly unable to utilize past experience.

Thomas Gallagher

#18. The colonel, pursued by sinister remorse for having killed a man in an affair of honor, brought everything necessary for recreating the past as far away as possible from his bad memories

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#19. For 24 hours a day, for 10 years, all I thought about was being in a band. That's all I did. I had no other social life. I don't want my life to be like that now. I've spent the past 10 years having a real life as well. But Spandau Ballet is such a difficult shadow to outrun.

Gary Kemp

#20. The book is the precious material expression of a past emotion, or the chance of having one in years to come, and to get rid of it would bring the risk of a serious sense of loss. (p. 28)

Jacques Bonnet

#21. There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can't, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.

Terry Pratchett

#22. Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.

Hilary Mantel

#23. If I just do everything the opposite of what my dad did, I think that will make things pretty easy. I can joke about it now because I'm past that stage where it used to hurt. By having a kid, it's gone. I could take all that negative energy that I had and put it in a positive way.

Derrick Rose

#24. Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.

Anne Lamott

#25. Victor smiled politely in return, the way someone smiles when they're thanked for having done a minor favor in times past. Held open a door in the rain, lent someone a small amount of money, butchered an ex-lover, that sort of thing.

David Weber

#26. Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you've ever tried to outrun. And then how to know - the present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the one so acutely alive under the kitchen table - which you, specifically, is the real one?

Garth Risk Hallberg

#27. And perhaps this has to do with what I sense is a turning away from the idea of religion as being about conserving a certain heritage from the past towards religion as having to do with how we orientate ourselves to the future, to all we truly long for, to hope.

George Pattison

#28. [On visitors after having a new baby ... ] Put a lock on the door, barricade it if you have to. No one gets past that front door unless they come bearing one of two things: food or cleaning products!

Claudine Wolk

#29. Work mixed with management becomes not only easier but more profitable. The time is past when anyone can boast about 'hard work' without having a corresponding result to show for it.

Henry Ford

#30. A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless ... speciesless.

John Fowles

#31. I'm rather pleased with the new manuals. I see Inform now as a gauche young adult, having got past the stage of growing out of his shoes every few months.

Graham Nelson

#32. I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.

John Keats

#33. You will always be the most important thing in my life. I'll always be there for you no matter what or who. I have no past without you and I can't imagine a future that doesn't include you. I just need some time to figure out how I can have you in my life without having you be my life.

Alison G. Bailey

#34. So why didn't I switch schools? The other good schools I could have sent Bee to ... well, to get to them, I'd have to drive past a Buca di Beppo. I hated my life enough without having to drive past a Buca di Beppo four times a day.

Maria Semple

#35. Life is happening whether you embrace it or not. You need to let go of the past, the pain, whatever holds you back from having a bright life. You need to free yourself, your mind, your heart.

S.L. Scott

#36. One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past ...

Storm Jameson

#37. Digital transformation represents a break with the past, having a high level of impact and complexity.

Pearl Zhu

#38. Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.

Martin Heidegger

#39. I once read that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past ... but forgiving is not the same as obliterating memory.

Martha Beck

#40. I am very lucky and grateful to have this living link to a past era, the violin presumably having much more history to it than the later portion that I know.

Lara St. John

#41. My sense of humor was a tool for me getting past my mother and father separating, my older brother having cerebral palsy, and the bullies in the schoolyard. I had to make them laugh to keep them off my ass. I brought that to my professional career.

Tracy Morgan

#42. She was supposed to be writing an essay on how geography had shaped the great battles of the past, but she was having trouble concentrating. In fact, all she'd managed so far was a title. How Geography Has Shaped the Great Battles of the Past.

Cinda Williams Chima

#43. I was this guy who'd been racing around down there, on that field in 1999, running straight over people, scoring tries, winning games, having fun. And I ended up so sick I couldn't even run past a little baby.

Jonah Lomu

#44. Grady felt a chill echo, the kind that comes when, in an original situation, one has the sensation of its all having occurred before: if we know the past, and live the present, is it possible that we dream the future?

Truman Capote

#45. When a man comes to me, I accept him at his best, not at his worst. Why make so much ado? When a man washes his hands before paying a visit, and you receive him in that clean state, you do not thereby stand surety for his always having been clean in the past.

Confucius

#46. Who was it who said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past?

Anne Lamott

#47. Being a leader for me is about having the courage to speak the truth, and live the truth, despite attempts to silence our thoughts, feelings, and past experiences.

Zainab Salbi

#48. It's really good to be able to think about past loves without having a pit in my stomach, or cringing or feeling heart-broken, or like they hate you. Don't you think?

Winona Ryder

#49. The thing that's changed the way I do my stand-up act is having kids and getting older and wiser and smarter. There might be a joke or two in the past that I wish I hadn't done, but in the past, you can't have it back.

Larry The Cable Guy

#50. A man with no children can easily be lulled into a sense that time is standing still. It's not. It's marching past us, relentlessly. Having a child growing and changing before your eyes makes this unavoidably clear.

Jonathan V. Last

#51. But even after the first week, when Hart got out of the presidential race because of the Washington Post's threat to reveal a long-term relationship Hart had apparently been having with a prominent Washington woman, the media continued to embellish my past.

Donna Rice

#52. Desiree. It's like falling in love every night and having your heart broken every morning ... Having more memory is just a way of distorting a greater amount of the past.

Craig Clevenger

#53. For me, the best things in life - meaningful work, meaningful relationships, interesting experiences, good food, sleep, music, ideas, sex, and other basic needs and pleasures - are not, past a certain point, materially improved upon by having a lot of money.

Ray Dalio

#54. One of the best things about having children is that it enables you to have the same loving memories as another person - you can summon the same past. Two flashbacks but with a single image.

Allison Pearson

#55. The service had reminded her of the meaning of Christmas and given her a sense of peace. It had also reminded her of the baby she carried and the hope that having a child brought into her life. Did the past really matter? Not if she didn't let it, she decided.

Brenda Novak

#56. America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.

Jean Baudrillard

#57. Don't feel ashamed for having those feelings and those memories. What happened in the past can't be changed, but they can be a guide for what happens in the future.

Maria V. Snyder

#58. The president is now having to deal with a Congress. He's never had to do that before. The president in the past, he has just done whatever he wanted. He had a big rubberstamp here up on Capitol Hill, whatever he wanted, they stamped OK. That's not the way it is now.

Harry Reid

#59. It is a sad commentary that today we face a choice between having schools that are a monument to our past - or schools that will be the lifeblood of our future. But since that is our choice, let us resolve to choose wisely.

Ted Kulongoski

#60. Doing everything with one arm, being well-known, and having a book and a movie, it's fairly abnormal. As far as just not having to worry about past experiences, I've healed very well.

Bethany Hamilton

#61. You could read a hundred books about the attitudes and beliefs of the past, but the impact of witnessing this casual, ignorant cruelty firsthand was like having a bucket of ice upended over your head.

Alexandra Bracken

#62. Having hits buries a singer in the past. A lot of singers hide in the past because it's safer back there. If you've ever heard today's country music, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Bob Dylan

#63. to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past.

George Orwell

#64. The reason I entered politics was a belief that the people of this country - having achieved so much that was good and noble in our past - had the potential to do amazing things in the future.

Michael Gove

#65. Relationship Time to Aloneness. Having a companion fixes you in time and that of the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present.

John Steinbeck

#66. Forgiveness is the key that can unshackle us from a past that will not rest in the grave of things over and done with. As long as our minds are captive to the memory of having been wronged, they are not free to wish for reconciliation with the one who wronged us.

Lewis B. Smedes

#67. We do not have the luxury of two big oceans protecting us as we have had in the past, for we now have a new kind of enemy who deals with stealthiness. Our ability to protect ourselves is having the information ahead of time so we can thwart the attack.

Bill Nelson

#68. Being a writer can be a very lonely profession, but having a network of people who can sympathize with everything you're going through - from contract issues to the terror of changing your novel from past- to present-tense - is an invaluable asset.

Lisa Graff

#69. I'm a guy whose first motion picture experience was seeing Ridley Scott glide past on a camera on a hundred and fifty million dollar film, and prep two movies, and there is no way to overstate that when you've worked with Ridley, it's like having been a quarterdeck lieutenant to Lord Nelson.

William Monahan

#70. When people ask me how we've lived past one hundred, I say, 'Honey, we never married. We never had husbands to worry us to death!
A. Elizabeth (Bessie) Delany

Amy Hill Hearth

#71. Sixty years ago the idea of everyone having a telephone in their pockets was science fiction. Our whole way of life is science fiction, if you look at it from the past.

Sam Hawksmoor

#72. Holding on to the past means you can never be open to having a future

Laurann Dohner

#73. Having sex with a dead grammar teacher is a violation of past tense usage.

Dana Gould

#74. You can get over a broken past if you decide to believe that there's nothing in your past that can keep you from having a great future.

Joyce Meyer

#75. If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.

Stephen Graham Jones

#76. From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we started, the past having made one great slow turn on a carousel to become our future, and if we have learned anything worth learning, the carousel will bring us to the one place we most need to be.

Dean Koontz

#77. I think there are a number of things that you can do to encourage your kids' dreams, but I do believe in speaking by experience of having a lot of help along the way, stumbling in the past. We've all stumbled, and we certainly all deserve to get up and walk again.

Dwayne Johnson

#78. Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future.

Simone De Beauvoir

#79. Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled 'the past,' and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.

Zelda Fitzgerald

#80. Fame is a perverse deformity, an ego swelling as ludicrous as an extra organ, and the people that have it, for a huge part, are willfully and deliberately fucked-up past the point of ever having anything sweet or human or normal about themselves ever again.

Cintra Wilson

#81. The best armor against slander is having an honorable past. A good name is always made of smear-proof material.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#82. Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

Barbara Kingsolver

#83. One of the beautiful things about having kids is I had no idea how much it will make you look into yourself and who you are and what you believe in and what your past was like and all that kind of stuff. I think it's made me really look at life in a much more intense way.

Jamie Cullum

#84. Even though there's no forum for me on the radio for the kind of music I sing anymore, I am still excited about having a career where I can sing the best music in the world, and people will come and hear me because of the hit records I've had in the past.

Johnny Mathis