Personal History Quotes

• No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Men, Poet

  Katherine Anne Porter (2008). “Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings”, p.781, Library of America

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• And then there is our personal history. Memories only we share. Things not another living soul would understand.

  Emily Giffin

  Memories, Soul, Share

  3 Copy quote

• We live in a post-authentic world, and today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It's all just what you're bringing when the lights go down. It's your teachers, your influences, and your personal history. At the end of the day, it's the power and purpose of your music that still matters.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Music, Teacher, Mirrors

  "The post-authentic world". "Future Tense" with Antony Funnell, www.abc.net.au. September 23, 2012.

  3 Copy quote

  Show source
• 

  Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.

  Anthony Bourdain

  Grandma, Feelings, Tribes

  15 Copy quote

• I've always been so interested in personal history. I'm very fascinated by my parents' and my grandparents' generations. I seem to think that they had a resilience and an integrity that may be somewhat deficient in my own generation, and in subsequent generations as well, because America has been rather easy to live in since the Depression.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Integrity, Thinking, America

  Source: www.achievement.org

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.

  A. E. Housman

  Philosophy, Historical, World

  8 Copy quote

• When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes-and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history.

  Andrew Solomon

  Hero, Dragons, Conformity

  Andrew Solomon (2012). “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity”, p.46, Simon and Schuster

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

  Siri Hustvedt

  Sick, Culture, Phenomenology

  Siri Hustvedt (2010). “The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves”, p.39, Macmillan

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• Because of my personal history, my professional skills and my business achievements, I am a man nobody can expect to compare himself with.

  Silvio Berlusconi

  Men, Skills, Compare

  8 Copy quote

• Most libels, and I have taken about 30 actions, take place at election time. It has not stuck because I am prepared to go before a court, stand in the witness box and face the most aggressive of lawyers who can cross-examine me on my personal history.

  Lee Kuan Yew

  Taken, Faces, Election Time

  3 Copy quote

• There is a tendency for humans to consciously see what they wish to see. They literally have difficulty seeing things with negative connotations while seeing with increasing ease items that are positive. For example, words that evoke anxiety, either because of an individuals personal history or because of experimental manipulation, require greater illumination before first being perceived.

  Lionel Tiger

  Illumination, Anxiety, Wish

  6 Copy quote

• My personal history would not be disappointing to readers, but it is my own affair which I want to keep to myself. I am in fact in no way more important than is the typesetter for my books, the man who works the mill; no more important than the man who binds my books and the woman who wraps them and the scrubwoman who cleans up the office.

  B. Traven

  Book, Men, Office

  7 Copy quote

• The new approach to health care will feature the healing power of story. In the clear understanding that finding meaning in any life passage may be at the heart of healing, our healers -declared or undeclared - will help people use the power of dreaming to move beyond personal history into a bigger story that contains the juice and sense of purpose to get them through.

  Robert Moss

  Dream, Moving, Heart

  13 Copy quote

• I urge you to pursue preserving your personal history to allow your children and grandchildren to know who you were as a child and what your hopes and dreams were.

  Oprah Winfrey

  Dream, Children, Pursue

  6 Copy quote

• It is best to erase all personal history because that would make us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people

  Carlos Castaneda

  People, Historical, Erase

  Carlos Castaneda (1972). “Journey to Ixtlan: the Lessons of Don Juan”, [Vancouver, B.C.] : Vancouver Taped Books Project

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Years, Biographies, Interest

  Katherine Anne Porter (2008). “Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings”, p.650, Library of America

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Thinking, Shining, Littles

  11 Copy quote

• If we insist that public life be reserved for those whose personal history is pristine, we are not going to get paragons of virtue running our affairs. We will get the very rich, who contract out the messy things in life the very dull, who have nothing to hide and nothing to show and the very devious, expert at covering their tracks and ambitious enough to risk their discovery.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Running, Discovery, Things In Life

  Charles Krauthammer (1985). “Cutting edges: making sense of the eighties”, Random House (NY)

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody's mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Memories, Achievement, Ego

  "Sunday Profile: Eckhart Tolle". Interview with Dan Harris, abcnews.go.com. February 15, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Order, Networking, Snapshots

  Douglas Rushkoff (2013). “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now”, p.57, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ester asked why people are sad. "That’s simple," says the old man. "They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.

  Paulo Coelho

  Life, Dream, Memories

  33 Copy quote

• Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.

  Janet Fitch

  Mother, Memories, Broken

  Janet Fitch (2013). “White Oleander”, p.246, Hachette UK

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is possible to know all about doctrine and yet not know Jesus. The soul is in danger when knowledge of doctrine outsteps intimate touch with Jesus. ....Have I a personal history with Jesus Christ? The one sign of discipleship is intimate connection with Him, a knowledge of Jesus Christ nothing can shake.

  Oswald Chambers

  Jesus, Soul, Connections

  Oswald Chambers (2011). “The Quotable Oswald Chambers”, p.225, Discovery House

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Personal history must be constantly renewed by telling parents, relatives, and friends everything one does. On the other hand, for the warrior who has no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with his acts. And above all, no one pins him down with their thoughts and their expectations.

  Carlos Castaneda

  Spiritual, Courage, Warrior

  19 Copy quote

• I was thinking about framing, and how so much of what we think about our lives and our personal histories revolves around how we frame it. The lens we see it through, or the way we tell our own stories. We mythologize ourselves. So I was thinking about Persephone's story, and how different it would be if you told it only from the perspective of Hades. Same story, but it would probably be unrecognizable. Demeter's would be about loss and devastation. Hades's would be about love.

  Kiersten White

  Loss, Thinking, Perspective

  8 Copy quote