Top 100 Quotes About What Would Have Been
#1. What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it?
Thomas Merton
#2. When nothing was, then God was there,
Had nothing been God would have been;
My being has defeated me,
Had I not been, what would have been.
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
#3. Most executives have learned that what one postpones, one actually abandons ... timing is a most important element in the success of any effort. To do five years later what would have been smart to do five years earlier, is almost a sure recipe for frustration and failure.
Peter Drucker
#4. Terrible grabbed her as she rounded the corner, his lips curved in what would have been a grin on a normal person, which he wasn't. On his scarred, shadowed face, the smile made him look like he was getting ready to bite.
Stacia Kane
#5. His lovely wife tends her zinnias in the mild morning light and his find young man comes fondly mishandling that perpetually lost sheep of a cat, Soapy, once more back from perdition for the time being, to what would have been general rejoicing.
Marilynne Robinson
#6. You look at Governor Romney's record in the private sector, he helped turn businesses around. Certainly a decade ago he took what would have been an international disaster with the U.S. Olympics, and turned it around for America and made us great again with the Olympics in Salt Lake City.
Scott Walker
#7. Obstacles are not opposing you, but merely and gently re-routing you. It is important not to view that which stands in your way as your 'enemy.' It can often be your best friend, sending you on a detour that takes you around what would have been your biggest stumbling block.
Neale Donald Walsch
#8. But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear? What love might there have been that I didn't feel?
Lucia Berlin
#11. To believe, to act, and to have events confound you - I grant you, that is hard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong - how can you not see? That is what would have been reprehensible.
Geraldine Brooks
#12. The first shot causes warm rain to fall on Diana's arms from the sky. The second plants a mirrored jewel in the left temporal lobe of her brain ... a place she could have named on a quiz but which now seems to be the place where the future is imagined, the place where what would have been is.
Laura Kasischke
#13. I got a promo of 'Nichts Muss' in what would have been 2002 or 2003 and fell totally in love with it after listening to it on an airplane that took me to Australia via Taipei and Kuala Lumpur.
John Darnielle
#14. Early detection is key," she said. "And if I hadn't found my lump early, I don't know what would have been. I am still here and I want to encourage women to do that on a regular basis.
Olivia Newton-John
#15. I grew up on a farm with only two TV channels. I didn't grow up around much culture. When I got excited about painting, I never really got further than what would have been in a modern art history textbook.
Neil Farber
#16. If you keep in secret what would have been used to help you, you will never be helped! Your gifts make way for you to lead; use them well!
Israelmore Ayivor
#17. We had offers to go everywhere and we could have done them. But what would have been the point? We were tired. We had worked hard and needed a break before we got stale. We spent six months at home and writing songs.
John Bonham
#18. Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.
Mona Simpson
#19. I don't know what would have been worse: If Mira had come home one day to say she was gay or an actress.
Paul Sorvino
#20. Things that I Hope Are True about Heaven
That the radio always plays what would have been your favourite songs. That there's always coffee if you want it. That you're there. That it's real.
Neil Hilborn
#21. Heath Ledger was supposed to put our album on what would have been a new record label. I still feel a little dead after losing him.
Alex Ebert
#22. Kugel set off, the wind in what would have been, some years ago, his hair.
Shalom Auslander
#23. The hurricane complicates things in that what would have been purely a business decision becomes a decision of the heart.
Henry Cisneros
#24. And the thing about falling in love
is that no matter where you are when it happens, you can't help but to color those moments with beauty,
even if you're in a location of ugliness. He made what would have been a place of nightmares into a place
to dream.
Mia Sheridan
#25. ...and who's to say what would have been for the best? You only found out afterwards, when it was too late.
Julian Barnes
#26. I left school at 16 and skipped university to work, initially as a waiter. I think I missed out on what would have been great years.
Peter Mayle
#27. History isn't just what happened, but what happened to whom and why and what would have been different if the cast of characters had been different.
David McCullough
#28. I am forever grateful for not knowing - What would have been. WHAT WILL BE holds none of those bittersweet pangs and it is lit w joy.
Erica Goros
#29. What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#30. I've always known from the time I was eight years old what I wanted to do. I would have been fairly content to be someone's lead guitar player.
Brad Paisley
#31. Had she been in town, the two of them would have spent most of the day together, and she didn't want that. Then again, deep down, it was exactly what she wanted, leaving her more confused that she'd been in years.
Nicholas Sparks
#32. It had been too long since she'd had some hot sex. She wasn't looking for a relationship. No, a one night stand was what she wanted. Anonymous sex with a handsome cowboy that she would never have to see again.
Tamara Hoffa
#33. I didn't know what to do with myself. I wasn't excited by the teaching of the school. If they'd been intent on really teaching you things, I would have been a little more attentive.
Diane Cilento
#34. There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
William James
#35. Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.
Dean Wesley Smith
#36. Look at what President Kennedy managed to achieve during the Cuban missile crisis. If Bush had been president in 1962, do you think he would have avoided a nuclear war?
Bianca Jagger
#37. What I am arguing, in effect, is that the full democratic system of the second half of the fifth century B.C. would not have been introduced had there been no Athenian empire.
Moses Finley
#38. I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires. It would have been much harder for them to roost in the sunlight, which is a thing they clearly enjoy doing.
Marilynne Robinson
#39. I have been asked what would I ban immediately if I could. Advertising.
Vivienne Westwood
#40. What would I have done if I'd been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst.
Lionel Blue
#41. I think Jim got screwed. I think Jim Bakker would have been a great preacher. Jim Bakker was very good at what he did.
Jessica Hahn
#42. If Jesus simply came to tell us what to do and provide moral instruction so we could try harder to please God, then his life would have been an utter failure.
Matt Perman
#43. Yeah, see, and that proves my point. What killed Housini? A stupid accident. But for one moment of stupidity, he'd have grown old with his Bess and been happy as a big in shit. Notice I ain't young, and if I die, old Cletus would kick my ass for leaving him all alone down here. (Jack)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#44. First, imagine taking the potentially regret - producing path of inaction. Then imagine what the very best outcome would be were you to take this risk. By picturing both scenarios in advance, you can avoid the regret of what might have been.
Wayne Dyer
#45. You know, I always wondered what it would have been like to just go to school, play football with the guys and go to the prom. Just like a 'regular person.'
Donny Osmond
#46. I was surprised that President [Barak] Obama would be so bold to come here [UK] and tell people what to do.I think a lot of people don't like him and I think if he had not said it I think you're result might have been different.
Donald Trump
#47. What sense did the world make? Where was God, the Bloody Fool? Did He have no notion of fair and unfair? Couldn't He read a simple balance sheet? He would have been sacked long ago if He were managing a corporation, the things he allowed to happen ...
Rohinton Mistry
#48. Much of my adult life has been spent fighting for equal opportunity, and the idea that I would support limiting opportunity for any segment of society, particularly women, is antithetical to who I am and what I have done.
Paul Tudor Jones
#49. It was you, you who brought me the pardon. Pee on me, won't you. It would be like benediction. O, what a sleepwalker I have been!
Henry Miller
#50. This is what I would have done if I had to have a real job: I would have been a history teacher.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#51. What I'd have liked would have been the money and the hit records without the fame.
John Lennon
#52. We have all been guilty of complaining, but God does not look at it as lightly as we may think. Complaining was the reason the Jews ended up wandering in the desert for forty years. If we were more grateful for what God has done for us, abasing ourselves would not be a problem.
Monica Johnson
#53. What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.
Gustave Flaubert
#54. Life for me has been exactly what I thought it would be, a cake, which I have eaten and had too.
Margaret Anderson
#55. Would that my hands were meant to build. I would know what to say. What to do. Maybe in another life I would have been that man. In this one, my words, like my hands, are clumsy. All they can do is cut. All they can do is break.
Pierce Brown
#56. I have a unique history. There's no way to ever separate what your life would have been like if you had taken a different path. You have to embrace what is yours, and if you don't like it, you have to decide to change it.
Eve Plumb
#57. I was the only child, and I know my father had certain thoughts about me. He was a lawyer and extremely literary, but he would have been much happier if I had wanted to be a lawyer, a scientist, an engineer. But what I wanted to do was read.
Robert Gottlieb
#58. She fell fast and she fell hard, but what did that matter, since she would have gladly dropped a thousand feet onto a bed of nails if Westley had been waiting at the bottom. Down,
William Goldman
#59. After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.
Joyce Carol Oates
#60. At any other time, we would have been sheep in the company of wolves. But now, we have what people might call "presence".
Susan Ee
#61. Of course, if more people had been organ donors, unwinding never would have happened ... but people like to keep what's theirs, even after their dead. It didnt take long for ethics to be crushed by greed. Unwinding became big business, and people let it happen
Neal Shusterman
#62. What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!
Kurt Vonnegut
#63. Becky!" I had to laugh. "You're worse than me! It's no wonder he's such an egomaniac."
"What? You're telling me you can say no to that face?"
I wanted to say yes, but it would have been a lie and we all knew it.
Kelly Oram
#64. I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Steve Jobs
#65. For thence a paradox Which comforts while it mocks, - Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.
Robert Browning
#66. Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.
Margaret Atwood
#67. I had the feeling deep in my gut that there'd been lines I should have spoken, gestures I should have made, that would have made things better. But looking back, I didn't know what they were. As a friend, I was pretty much useless, apparently.
Megan Crewe
#68. Question: What is he? Answer: A sluggard; how very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself! It would mean that I was positively defined, it would mean that there was something to say about me. "Sluggard" - why, it is a calling and vocation, it is a career. Do not jest, it is so.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#69. I think Starbucks created a platform and, ultimately, a runway for many other companies to emulate. I suspect if we had not achieved what we have, there would have been many regional brands that would have succeeded. But I'm not sure there would have been a national brand of the scope of Starbucks.
Howard Schultz
#70. The designs were based on quite a lot of research of what a movie musical is, filtered through the eyes of today. If we'd gone strictly with the '20s, the movement would have been impaired.
Colleen Atwood
#71. I did what any other Fae would have done. Only, I fucked up by thinking I would be done with you by the time he'd been fully changed over to my world. I fucked up by thinking that a short amount of time with you would be enough.
Amelia Hutchins
#72. I am now satisfied of what I always though
which is how much more women can do if they set about it then men. I will lay any bet that had you been here, you would not have got half as much on board as I have.
Karen Essex
#73. Those whom God pardons must be made to know what their sin deserved, and how miserable they would have been if they had been unpardoned, that God's mercy may be the more magnified.
Matthew Henry
#74. There's no point in using someone else's characters if you're going to turn them into your own vision. You have to be loyal to that person's worldview and sensitive to what they would and wouldn't have done with their characters, and how explicit or inexplicit they would've been.
Jill Paton Walsh
#75. When government taxes and regulates, what is seen are the visible effects of government contracts, grants, and subsidies. What is not seen are all of the property, business, and jobs that would have been created if citizens were left with the right to choose.
John Pugsley
#76. But she forgot nothing, and he sometimes forgot much too quickly, and, often that same day, encouraged by her composure, would laugh and frolic over the champagne, if friends stopped by. What venom must have been in her eyes at those moments yet he noticed nothing!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#77. Then her story and the way she told it had touched his heart. That she should have tried to understand - to offer help - and been turned away so often. Oh, he would not turn her away, he would take what she had to give and count himself rich for it.
Ahdaf Soueif
#78. Experience is the only teacher," Hey-Soos says. "Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don't listen to their parents, or people don't leave churches and do what the preacher tells them?
Chris Crutcher
#79. Ali always said I would be nothing without him. But what would he have been without me?
Joe Frazier
#80. Maybe if I hadn't been so hell-bent on not becoming my parents, I could have saved Charlie. Maybe I would have been his girlfriend. Maybe we could have gotten married and been happy, regardless of who our parents were and what they did to each other.
A.S. King
#81. Her lack of maidenly scruple would have amused me at another moment, but just now her face was so grimly determined that I could only wonder what she had in mind. Nothing could have been less seductive, anyway, than her expression at that moment.
Elizabeth Kostova
#82. So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.
Joan Didion
#83. One of the best wedding gfts God gave you was a full-length mirror called your spouse. Had there been a card attached, it would have said, "Here's to helping you discover what you're really like!" - Gary and Betsy Ricucci
Gary L. Thomas
#84. I'm creative in my own life. I'm creative when I step out the door. I'm creative when I pick up a glass. Do you know what I mean? I'm one of those dreadful people who probably should have been born at the end of the 19th century and been in cafe society. That would have suited me fine.
Jaye Davidson
#85. It's me, it's been me all along and I might have saved your life, but I would be nothing if it wasn't for you. I would be just another mech-droid and I wouldn't know what's like to love someone so much I would give up everything for them.
Marissa Meyer
#86. I can't imagine ever not doing [acting]. I would feel like I would have lost a limb. But I am older now, and sometimes I wonder who I would have been and what about me would have changed had I not had these experiences as a young person
Jodie Foster
#87. What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease [AIDS] had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.
David Levithan
#88. If there had been a strong democratic sentiment in Germany, Hitler would never have come to power . [Germans] deserved what they got when they went round crying for a hero.
A.J.P. Taylor
#89. What would Miss Frost have thought of me? I wondered; I didn't mean my writing. What would she have thought of my relationships with men and women? Had I ever "protected" anyone? For whom had I truly been worthwhile?
John Irving
#90. Why, her father would turn in his grave
well, as a matter of fact, he was cremated, but what I mean is, if he hadn't been he would have. [Ermyntrude]
Georgette Heyer
#91. Having one's image, and effectively, life, democratized, dehumanizes and sometimes objectifies it into an entertainment product. What sort of valuation of the ego would one have once you've let it been preyed upon by the public for years and years? Perhaps, it becomes truly just skin and bones.
Jack Gleeson
#92. I wasn't interested in having children of my own. I know what would have happened - I'd have been left at home to look after the kids, and my career would have been over while my husband travelled the world.
Marie Helvin
#93. It's good to have it over with. I worked on it a long time, and I didn't know what people were going to think of it. Would people like it? Would they buy it? So far it's been doing pretty well.
Michael Chabon
#94. Knowing what I know now and what I have been through, would I do it the same? I look at the alternative - a very simple life. It would have been nice to have a simple life.
Donny Osmond
#95. If I'd still been in one piece from the World Cup and gone through my career, what type of player would I have been? No doubt about it, if I hadn't had as many injuries I would have been the all-time leading scorer for England.
Michael Owen
#96. When I came in, the city was on the edge of bankruptcy. I'm proud of what I did. I built the foundation that mayors after me built upon - particularly Bloomberg. But the foundation was essential because if it hadn't occurred, we would have been another Detroit.
Ed Koch
#97. Often I've wondered what it would feel like to be him," he whispered softly. "To feel the warmth of your skin under my cold hand or your hot breath on my lips. These last few days have been torment on my curiosity.
Kellie Thacker
#98. In my heart of hearts my motivation would always have been to be the best, and I think that athletics is probably what I was built for.
Daley Thompson
#99. What would have become of Ohio State if I said everything? Half the team would have been suspended, and it would have been worse for everybody. I was like, 'Why don't I just take it?'
Maurice Clarett
#100. They don't have classes on bravery in middle school. If they did I'd have signed up. It would have been helpful to learn how to stare down what I feared most and not blink.
Shannon Wiersbitzky
