Attributed to Catherine Doherty in Inflamed by Love by Jean Fox
Attributed
Lord Illingworth http://books.google.com/books?id=RHkWAAAAYAAJ&q="The+only+difference+between+the+saint+and+the+sinner+is+that+every+saint+has+a+past+and+every+sinner+has+a+future"&pg=PA119#v=onepage, Act III
A Woman of No Importance (1893)
“I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, the sinners are much more fun.”
Variant: I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.
"Un Nouveau théologien" (1911)
Basic Verities, Prose and Poetry (1943)
“There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.”
This is sometimes attributed to Augustine, but the earliest known occurrence is in Persian Rosary (c. 1929) by Ahmad Sohrab (PDF) http://magshare.net/narchive/NArchive/Misc/Raw_Data/A_Persian_Rosary_by_Mirza_Ahmad_Sohrab.pdf, which probably originates as a paraphrase of a statement in Oscar Wilde's 1893 play A Woman of No Importance: "The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."
Misattributed
“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
“Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.”
“Every saint has a past. Every sinner has a future.”
