Fred Rogers Quotes

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

I am a man of tomorrow, but I also live my past.

I'm still the same cat I always was.

There is no man who is not, at each moment, what he has been and what he will be.

The self is not so much linked to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the same thing as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the self aged fifty is the continuation of the self aged forty.

Tell me your past, my beloved, for a man is his past, and is to be known by it.

I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?

At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.

All the past up to a moment ago is your legacy. You have a right to it.

If you get to a certain age, all people want to know about you is people you knew. ...An American student once said to me, you know, isn't it extraordinary that I am alive and you're not dead.

I'm not a comic book character. I'm not Indiana Jones or Bond, I'm a flesh and blood guy who is ageing and changing. I don't have to do what I did in '93. I couldn't do it and thank God.

It is not that I belong to the past, but the past that belongs to me.

I think the issues of identity mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.

My face carries all of my memories. Why would I erase them?

You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.

Did you ever wonder if the person in the picture is the same one you see when you look in the mirror?" - "That's the eternal question, isn't it? Are we born who we are, or do we make ourselves that way?

One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.

I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.

There is a part of me that is desperately wanting to not necessarily be this cute, endearing, heart-on-his-sleeve type of character that just wants to be liked.

We are what we seem to be.

What are we but our stories?

The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.

Also, where does your identity come from? Your memory, of course.

The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.