Best 92 quotes in «hindsight quotes» category

In the argument over whether knowledge is power or ignorance is bliss, it seems I've always come down on the side of ignorance. And when that's the side you fall on, you don't realize it until it's too late.

I think there is no difference between love and infatuation. If it works out, we call it love; if it doesn’t, we shrug our shoulders and say it was infatuation. It’s a hindsight word.

It's always so easy to say what everyone should have done when you know that what they actually did didn't work.

It is easy to be wise after the event.

It was nice to call my parents and proudly tell them, "My lady garden is going viral." In hindsight, that may have been a poor choice of phrasing.

It was with the benefit of hindsight that I realized high altitude astronomy was the most toxic employer I ever worked for.

Naturally—and why should I not admit this—I have occasionally wondered to myself how things might have turned out in the long run.... I only speculate this now because in the light of subsequent events, it could well be argued that in making my decision...I was perhaps not entirely aware of the full implications of what I was doing. Indeed, it might even be said that this small decision of mine constituted something of a key turning point; that that decision set things on an inevitable course towards what eventually happened. But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.... What would have transpired, one may ask, had one responded slightly differently...? And perhaps—occurring as it did around the same time as these events?

It is strange, I thought, how we always recognize our best memories in hindsight.

Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn't anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. He remembered his children's distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. Knowing that they couldn't believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like Jenny's books after all. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description - you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. Whatever everything was. And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there.

Lonzi said the only thing worth loving was what was to come, and since what was to come was unforeseeable---only a cretin or a liar would try to predict the future---the future had to be lived now, in the now, as intensity.

Pah! I wave my cuff at hindsight as if it were a bothersome fly. Life can only be lived forwards, Ulysses. All that matters is what you do now.

One of the less entertaining things about getting older, is that you learn that most things sound like bullshit are actually true. It's easy, in hindsight, to believe people were incompetent, that they should have seen it coming, that someone who knew what they were doing could have prevented all of it. But nothing in life is so linear, Chief. And nothing in life is so simple.

No way, man. I got one rule as a driver.” “What’s that?” “Never look in da rearview mirror.” “Never?" We drifted into the left-hand lane, cutting off a cab. “It’s not healthy to keep a’ watchin’ what you leavin’ behind.

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed in the reverse way, if we start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final results, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have otherwise been determined.

Sometimes we disassociates from the past in order to face the future without fear.

Retrospect: the sweetener of life.

The Battle of Normandy was won on the beaches of Dieppe

Such vows . . . strike one with a sort of horror at what happened afterwards.

The dead know everything, but don't give a damn.

The Mistake With the mistake your life goes in reverse. Now you can see exactly what you did Wrong yesterday and wrong the day before And each mistake leads back to something worse And every nuance of your hypocrisy Towards yourself, and every excuse Stands solidly on the perspective lines And there is perfect visibility. What an enlightenment. The colonnade Rolls past on either side. You needn't move. The statues of your errors brush your sleeve. You watch the tale turn back — and you're dismayed. And this dismay at this, this big mistake Is made worse by the sight of all those who Knew all along where these mistakes would lead — Those frozen friends who watched the crisis break. Why didn't they say? Oh, but they did indeed — Said with a murmur when the time was wrong Or by a mild refusal to assent Or told you plainly but you would not heed. Yes, you can hear them now. It hurts. It's worse Than any sneer from any enemy. Take this dismay. Lay claim to this mistake. Look straight along the lines of this reverse.

The only sight I seem to possess nowadays is hindsight.

The problem with comprehension is, it often comes too late.

The problem with guilt was not how it attacks the present, but how it stained the past. Hindsight was a blemish on memory.

She wished she had known back then. Known that happiness isn't a point in time you leave behind. It's what's ahead of you. Every single day.

the greater number of a man's errors come before him disguised under the specious form of necessity; then, after error has been committed in a moment of excitement, of delirium, or of fear, we see that we might have avoided and escaped it.

The historian is a prophet looking backwards.

This was how I would die. Strangled by an attractive, seminaked woman inside a fridge with a giant tarantula in the middle of a sea of carnivorous jam. As I blacked out, all I could think of was a fortune teller I'd spoken to a few years ago, and how full of shit she'd turned out to be.

There's a difference between thinking you can't be wrong and having no regrets. Wrongness is what occurs prior to empiricism, in hindsight a counterpart of revelation, and revelation is nothing to regret.

To fulfill your vision, you must have hindsight, insight and foresight.

Well, Hindsight, have you ever heard of the term Busy Idiot?

We are what we remember. If we lose our memory, we lose our identity and our identity is the accumulation of our experiences. When we walk down the memory lane, it can be unconsciously, willingly, selectively, impetuously or sometimes grudgingly. By following our stream of consciousness we look for lost time and things past. Some reminiscences become anchor points that can take another scope with the wisdom of hindsight. ("Walking down the memory lane" )

While I formally became disabled at age 45, with the benefit of hindsight I should have registered as disabled at age 35.

We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realise what we've been through and understand what it means.

Which of our unnoticed isms will the hindsight of future generations condemn?

What discoveries I made in the course of writing stories all begin with the particular, never the general. They are mostly hindsight: arrows that I now find I myself have left behind me, which have shown me some right, or wrong, way I have come. What one story may have pointed out to me is of no avail in the writing of another. But 'avail' is not what I want; freedom ahead is what each story promises - beginning anew. And all the while, as further hindsight has told me, certain patterns in my work repeat themselves without my realizing. There would be no way of knowing this, for during the writing of any single story, there is no other existing. Each writer must find out for himself, I imagine, on what basis he lives with his own stories.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was a serious mistake to think that the modern corporate healthcare system could accurately diagnose and treat me.

With the benefit of hindsight, the biggest mistake that I made in life was working in the toxic field of high altitude astronomy.

With the benefit of hindsight, I realized that I was fooled into working at the biologically toxic Mauna Kea Observatories (MKO).

With the benefit of hindsight, I realized that there was a blatant disregard for worker health and safety by the astronomical management teams that I worked for in the USA.

With the benefit of hindsight, I realized that astronomers had successfully avoided fully researching the harmful biological effects that their high altitude facilities were having on their workers health and safety.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was clear that astronomy management teams were lying through silence to their workers regarding the toxicity of their high altitude astronomical facilities.

With the benefit of hindsight, I would not choose a career that had me working with the various forms of electromagnetic radiation.

You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire.

But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.

Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.

hindsight is not a strategy.

Cliff Stearns talks about what he did to Planned Parenthood, making Solyndra a household name - why didn't he do this sooner? Why didn't he see it coming? It's the oversight committee, not the hindsight committee.

Hindsight is common and bland as boiled potatoes.