Quotes & Sayings About Past Influencing Future

She glanced around at the tombstones. "You're surrounded by death here. Way too depressing. You really might want to think about getting another job."
"You see death and sadness in these sunken patches of dirt, I see lives lived fully and the good deeds of past generations influencing the future ones. — David Baldacci

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me - and there are thousands like me - you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy. — Virginia Woolf

What is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of freewill, is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing. — John Stuart Mill

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future. — Steve Jobs

I don't see myself as I really am. The reason is because I have blind spots. My past is full of experiences that are influencing my present and my future. These past experiences have given birth to fear and insecurity, which create huge blind spots. The past has also given birth to a thousand hopes, dreams, and ambitions that I carry deep within me, and these also prevent me from seeing myself as I really am. At times I can be cynical because of something or someone I encountered in the past, and this cynicism is a blind spot. I can also be paranoid at times - another blind spot. And guess what - I like being liked, and nothing will blind us like our desire to be liked, accepted, loved. All of these blind spots make it hard for me to see situations and people (especially myself) as they really are. — Matthew Kelly

Recent research suggests that New Deal programs may actually have had their primary impact on the economy by influencing consumer and business expectations of future growth and inflation. — Christina Romer