Life History Quotes

The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business. ~ Saul Bellow

Woody Allen said that 95% of history is explained as a man trying to impress a woman. And that's true in my life. ~ Mitt Romney

Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it.

Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording.

The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life. ~ Irving Finkel

You are fighting against nothingness all the time by creating a series of shields that you call personality, life history, feelings, ideas, and ways of seeing. ~ Frederick Lenz

'Operation Ajax' presents history in an entirely new way. It takes a true story and uses cutting-edge technology, never before used in this way, to bring it to spectacular life. ~ Stephen Kinzer

It is curious to note how fragile the memory is, even for the important times in one's life. This is, moreover, what explains the fortunate fantasy of history. ~ Marcel Duchamp

The spiritual life and especially its expression in mystical experience, is not so much a matter of striving for heights of mystical union between the soul and God who is utterly different from us. It is rather more a matter of attending to God's presence with us and responding to God's presence by being altogether present to the divine presence which is always near. The long history of Christian spirituality has to do with the various ways of responding to God's presence and participating ever more fully in the divine life altogether present in human life, history, the world and the church. ~ Michael Downey

Let me be one of the people who writes their life history, not with ink, with the colors of a caring heart. ~ Debasish Mridha

For much of their history, life for most people in China was arduous and circumscribed - and people travelled as little as they could. ~ Evan Osnos

For hundreds of thousands of years, life was brutal. It still is for a good chunk of the planet. The technology and wealth we enjoy in North America is a very new development in history, and I think we miss the challenges of day-to-day survival in our comparatively easy modern lives. Some people will even create problems if they have none. ~ Jeff Carlson

Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language. ~ Hilaire Belloc

I've been a conservative my whole life. There is nothing hard-right or far-right about anything. I just believe in ideas and that ideas matter in history, and that's my background, and that's the way I'd like to be portrayed. ~ Dave Brat

The reality of life in Northern Ireland is that if you were Protestant, you learned British history, and if you were Catholic, you learned Irish history in school. ~ James Nesbitt

We feel more emotion ... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history. ~ Chris Marker

The main problem facing a parasite over the long term, Burnet noted, is the issue of transmission: how to spread its offspring from one individual host to another. Various methods and traits have developed toward that simple end, ranging from massive replication, airborne dispersal, environmentally resistant life-history stages (like the small form of C. burnetii), direct transfer in blood and other bodily fluids, behavioral influence on the host (as exerted by the rabies virus, for instance, causing infected animals to bite), passage through intermediate or amplifier hosts, and the use of insect and arachnid vectors as means of transportation and injection. ~ David Quammen

Marxism is an interpretation of history which explains the progress of society as a product of the expansion of the forces of production of the material means of life, that is, the development of economy. ~ Earl Browder

It cannot be denied that Islam, regarded as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of polity - by which expression I mean a social structure regulated by a legal system and animated by a specific ethical ideal - has been the chief formative factor in the life-history of the Muslims of India. It has furnished those basic emotions and loyalties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups, and finally transform them into a well-defined people, possessing a moral consciousness of their own. ~ Muhammad Iqbal

We may not be responsible for another's addiction or the life history that preceded it, but many painful situations could be avoided if we recognized that we are responsible for the way we ourselves enter into the interaction. And that, to put it most simply, means dealing with our own stuff. ~ Gabor Mate

Every person my size has a different life, a different history. Different ways of dealing with it. Just because I'm seemingly O.K. with it, I can't preach how to be O.K. with it. I don't think I still am O.K. with it. There's days when I'm not. ~ Peter Dinklage

Your impact in life is a memory that lives forever thus be creative in positivity. ~ Oscar Auliq-Ice

Life is a school of probability. ~ Walter Bagehot

Only one who takes over his own life history can see in it the realization of his self. Responsibility to take over one's own biography means to get clear about who one wants to be. ~ Jurgen Habermas

Is it more important for you to know what happened in the First World War or to memorize other significant dates in history, or is it more important to learn the strategies they used for optimum leadership, success and joyful living?
Don't you think schools need to teach the latter? ~ Maddy Malhotra

I find historical figures in general very tricky because you feel at times that you're serving two masters. Not only the arc and wonderful writing that comes with the show, but also the history of a person's life. ~ Vincent Piazza

Throughout history, story telling was at the very beginning of life. ~ Anthony Horowitz

With regard to complex trauma survivors, self-determination and autonomy require that the therapist treat each client as the "authority" in determining the meaning and interpretation of his or her personal life history, including (but not limited to) traumatic experiences (Harvey, 1996). Therapists can inadvertently misappropriate the client's authority over the meaning and significance of her or his memories (and associated symptoms, such as intrusive reexperiencing or dissociative flashbacks) by suggesting specific "expert" interpretations of the memories or symptoms. Clients who feel profoundly abandoned by key caregivers may appear deeply grateful for such interpretations and pronouncements by their therapists, because they can fulfill a deep longing for a substitute parent who makes sense of the world or takes care of them. However, this delegation of authority to the therapist can backfire if the client cannot, or does not, take ownership of her or his own memories or life story by determining their personal meaning.Moreover, the client can be trapped in a stance of avoidance because trauma memories are never experienced, processed, and put to rest. Helping a client to develop a core sense of relational security and the capacity to regulate (and recover from) extreme hyper- or hypoarousal is essential if the client is to achieve a self-determined and autonomous approach to defining the meaning and impact of trauma memories, a crucial goal of posttraumatic therapy. ~ Christine A. Courtois

History proves beyond any possibility of doubt that no religion has ever given a stimulus to scientific progress comparable to that of Islam. The encouragement which learning and scientific research received from Islamic theology resulted in the splendid cultural achievements in the days of the Umayyads and Abbasids and the Arab rule in Sicily and Spain. I do not mention this in order that we might boast of those glorious memories at a time when the Islamic world has forsaken its own traditions and reverted to spiritual blindness and intellectual poverty. We have no right, in our present misery, to boast of past glories. But we must realize that it was the negligence of the Muslims and not any deficiency in the teachings of Islam that caused our present decay.

Islam has never been a barrier to progress and science. It appreciates the intellectual activities of man to such a degree as to place him above the angels. No other religion ever went so far in asserting the dominance of reason and, consequently, of learning, above all other manifestations of human life. ~ Muhammad Asad

The Incarnation, which is for traditional Christianity synonymous with the historical birth and earthly life of Christ, is for mystics of a certain type, not only this but also a perpetual Cosmic and personal process. It is an everlasting bringing forth, in the universe and also in the individual ascending soul, of the divine and perfect Life, the pure character of God, of which the one historical life dramatized the essential constituents. Hence the soul, like the physical embryo, resumes in its upward progress the spiritual life-history of the race. "The one secret, the greatest of all," says Patmore, is "the doctrine of the Incarnation, regarded not as an historical event which occurred two thousand years ago, but as an event which is renewed in the body of every one who is in the way to the fulfilment of his original destiny." 239 ~ Evelyn Underhill

Literature has always been a part of my life. I studied history and literature in college. My mother is a novelist; I grew up around books. ~ Elliot Ackerman

You know why I like to talk to you, Delia? You never interrupt with your experiences. Not jiggling your foot till you get a chance to jump in with your life history. ~ Anne Tyler

As an actress, you have to give your character a life, a history, and make it full and rich for yourself. ~ Cara Buono

I lived in Greece for about four years of my life, and living there had a huge impact on my life growing up. My father was very much adamant that we would learn about our culture. It's a very rich culture to be a part of since it has such a great history behind it. I definitely carry that in my job, and I am very passionate. ~ Marina And The Diamonds

So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life. ~ Amy Tan

But it is a law of life and development in history where two national civilizations meet they fight for ascendancy. ~ Bernhard Von Bulow

Your past is your ancestors and your life history. The wise ones do not ignore or forget that. It teaches and leads one to the vision for new ways. ~ Ehsan Sehgal

For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals. ~ Michael Rostovtzeff

Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in, no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for the good. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

Yet through history gays have always dominated religious life and churches. ~ Malcolm Boyd

The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier. ~ Edmund White

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

This is completely unacceptable. Your investigative skills are getting rusty, Angie. You usually have a guy's entire life history memorized within the first ten minutes of him showing up on your hot guy radar, and all you know about this one is his first name? ~ C.J. Anaya

I never imagined that divorce would be part of my life history or my family's legacy. When people say that divorce can be more painful than death, I understand why. But like any great trial, God uses everything for good, if we allow Him to heal us. ~ Kristin Armstrong

Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models. ~ Will Self

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history. ~ Tahar Ben Jelloun

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history. ~ Natasha Trethewey

What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

What a thrill it was to play opposite Maurice Evans in this brilliant, dazzling musical, based on the life of two of the greatest personalities in stage history. ~ Dinah Sheridan

There are good people who are dealt a bad hand by fate, and bad people who live long, comfortable, privileged lives. A small twist of fate can save or end a life; random chance is a permanent, powerful player in each of our lives, and in human history as well. ~ Jeff Greenfield

To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity. ~ Brian Christian

I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms. ~ Lauren Groff

I have been enormously impressed by the role that pure chance plays in determining our life history. I was reminded of some famous lines of Robert Frost:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
I took the one less travled by,
And that has made all the difference.
As I recalled my own experience and development, I was impressed by the series of lucky accidents that determined the road I traveled.
> From "Lives of the Laureates" pg.67 ~ Milton Friedman

I'm obsessed with insects, particularly insect flight. I think the evolution of insect flight is perhaps one of the most important events in the history of life. Without insects, there'd be no flowering plants. Without flowering plants, there would be no clever, fruit-eating primates giving TED Talks. ~ Michael Dickinson

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers. ~ Carlos Fuentes

My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis. ~ Anish Kapoor

It's been a strange day - a day when I thought I was on top of the world, planning my life. I planned all of my courses for the rest of the semester at Smith, and talked to my advisor about honoring in History. ~ Julie Nixon Eisenhower

Crazy Horse saw history as integrated in the present, incorporated into daily life. ~ Stephen Ambrose

Oh how nice!" the lady said. But not corny. She was just nice & all. "I must tell Ernest we met," she said. "May I ask your name, dear?"
"Rudolf Schmidt," I told her. I didn't feel like giving her my whole life history. Rudolf Schmidt was the name of the janitor of our dorm. ~ J.D. Salinger

There is always an action and reaction; an advance and a retreat; a rising and a sinking; manifested in all of the airs and phenomena of the Universe. Suns, worlds, men, animals, plants, minerals, forces, energy, mind and matter, yes, even Spirit, manifests this Principle. The Principle manifests in the creation and destruction of worlds; in the rise and fall of nations; in the life history of all things; and finally in the mental states of Man. ~ Three Initiates

Race is the San Andreas Fault of our culture as well as our history. Its fissures are forever present and not that far beneath the surface of every day life. To deny that is to risk being labeled delusional. ~ Mike Barnicle

Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins. ~ Jonathan Sacks

A woman's whole life is a history of the affections. ~ Washington Irving

The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist. ~ Anita Shreve

Let me share a famous life history with you. This was a man who failed in business at the age of twenty-one; was defeated in a legislative race at age twenty-two; failed again in business at age twenty-four; had his sweetheart die when he was age twennty-six; had a nervous breakdown at age twenty-seven; lost a congressional race at age thirty-four; lost a senatorial race at age forty-five; failed in an effort to become vice-president at age forty-seven; lost a senatorial race at age forty-nine; and was elected president of the United States at age fifty-two. This man was Abraham Lincoln. ~ Shiv Khera

For every book that I write ... I develop a history for each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what they like to eat, to what they want out of life. ~ Jojo Moyes

In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions much of one's life history is etched in the senses. ~ Banana Yoshimoto

There is no need to rush in life. Just with one word at a time, your sweet life history will be written boldly in capitals and highlighted for easy access. Be sure you are passing the test of patience! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

But, it's because we have a harder way to succeed in life as Serbs because of the past that we had and because of the history that we had. We have to dig deeper and we have to do much more in order to be seen and to be spotted. ~ Novak Djokovic

The first arrival of earthly life on another celestial body ranks as an epochal event not only for our generation, but in the history of our planet. Neil Armstrong was at the cusp of the Apollo programme. This was a collective technological effort of epic scale, but his is the one name sure to be remembered centuries hence. ~ Martin Rees

I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline. It didn't have the noble history of English and history as a subject. But once I had a little exposure to it, I said, 'Hey, here's the key. Here's the key to understanding life and all its forms.' ~ Tom Wolfe

He was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope's pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar: without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue; if ever any man had the right to say that he ruled by the right divine, it was Mohammed, for he had all the power without its instruments and without its supports. He cared not for the dressings of power. The simplicity of his private life was in keeping with his public life. ~ R. Bosworth Smith

A man who risks his life in shooting big game in order to secure good specimens for natural history collections, or to rid a district of a man-eater or other dangerous neighbor, is a sportsman in the true sense. ~ Robert Baden-Powell

The past itself is not a narrative. In its entirety, it is as chaotic, uncoordinated, and complex as life. History is about making sense of that mess, finding or creating patterns and meanings and stories from the maelstrom. ~ John H. Arnold

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life. ~ Toni Morrison

There is no replay of yesterday. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I never feel lonely if I've got a book - they're like old friends. Even if you're not reading them over and over again, you know they are there. And they're part of your history. They sort of tell a story about your journey through life. ~ Emilia Fox

There is no such thing as a criminal life. Life is life, and life is criminalized. No one ever, in the history of life, has chosen a criminal life. No one has ever said, 'I want to be a criminal.' No one ever has done that. ~ Rhys Ifans

Here and there [ ... ] vegetation rites took on a less attractive form. A man - or, in later and milder days, an animal - was sacrificed to the earth at sowing time, so that it might be fertilized by his blood. When the harvest came it was interpreted as the resurrection of the dead man; the victim was given, before and after his death, the honors of a god; and from this origin arose, in a thousand forms, the almost universal myth of a god dying for his people, and then returning triumphantly to life. ~ Will Durant

Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life. ~ Anton Chekhov

One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way. ~ Orhan Pamuk

In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour. ~ Stefan Zweig

History is not just about dates and quotations. And it's not just about politics, the military and social issues, though much of it of course is about that. It's about everything. It's about life history. It's human. And we have to see it that way. We have to teach it that way. We have to read it that way. It's about art, music, literature, money, science, love - the human experience. ~ David McCullough

It is my joy to share with present and future generations these stories so full of humor, warmth, and adventure – and so rich in the rural culture of the early 1900's. ~ Linda Boynton Pedersen

Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about. ~ Seth Lloyd

Tell me the size of a mammal and I can tell you, to about 85 per cent level, pretty much everything about its physiology and life history, such as how long it is going to live, how many offspring it will have, the length of its aorta, how long it will take to mature, what is the pulse rate in the ninth branch of its circuitry. ~ Geoffrey West

We have a harder way to succeed in life as Serbs because of the past that we had and because of the history we had. ~ Novak Djokovic

I don't think it's possible to separate out the strands of a writer's history, circumstances, life events, and that writer's themes. ~ Dani Shapiro

Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top - or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things ... Life is one crisis after another. ~ Richard M. Nixon

If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one. ~ Terry Eagleton

Personally, my interests are ancient history and ancient civilizations. In my own life, I'd like to go to places like Easter Island. ~ Nicolas Cage

I gave up the notion of writing the life of Joan of Arc, as I found that there was absolutely no new material to be gleaned on her history - in fact, she had been thrashed out. ~ Sabine Baring-Gould

I don't tell everyone my life history because if everyone knows your inside-leg measurement, how can you surprise them? ~ Penelope Wilton

Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence...
'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegia ~ John Barth

If you read the history of the national Socialist party, they're all people who felt like life should have been better to them. They're disappointed, vengeful, angry. ~ Alan Furst

People will not be bored. They may listen politely at a dinner table to boasts and personalities, life history, etc. But in print they choose their own companions, their own subjects. They was to be amused or benefitted ~ Claude C. Hopkins

To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children. ~ Polykarp Kusch

I have my husband and children near me in Rome, and I feel this is where we are temporarily belonging. But personally, all my life, I have felt the absence of a sense of history. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

We have not invaded anyone. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them. ~ A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life. ~ William Irwin Thompson

Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, [...] came to teach [the ancient inhabitants of Mexico] the benefits of settled agriculture and the skills necessary to build temples. Although this deity is frequently depicted as a serpent, he is more often shown in human form--the serpent being his symbol and his alter ego--and is usually described as "a tall bearded white man" ... "a mysterious person ... a white man with a strong formation of body, broad forehead, large eyes and a flowing beard." Indeed, [...] the attributes and life history of Quetzalcoatl are so human that it is not improbable that he may have been an actual historical character ... the memory of whose benefactions lingered after his death, and whose personality was eventually deified. The same could very well be said of Oannes--and just like Oannes at the head of the Apkallu (likewise depicted as prominently bearded) it seems that Quetzalcoatl traveled with his own brotherhood of sages and magicians. We learn that they arrived in Mexico "from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles," and that Quetzalcoatl was regarded as having been "the founder of cities, the framer of laws and the teacher of the calendar. ~ Graham Hancock

This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that. ~ John Perkins