Quotes about hindsight

In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.

Always plan no matter how improbable it seems. . The bill for hindsight is much more expensive than the reciept for foresight.

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 paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.

It is easy to be wise after the event.

Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise

How you look at it is pretty much how you'll see it

Retrospect: the sweetener of life.

But all these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event has justified them. If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousands and millions of suggestions and supposition are now forgotten that were current at the period, but have been shown by time to be unfounded and so have been consigned to oblivion.

The Battle of Normandy was won on the beaches of Dieppe

I don't know if you have children of your own, Mariamjo, but if you do I pray that God look after them and spare you the grief that I have known. I still dream of them. I still dream of my dead children.I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. Imiss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling sha

I don't know if you have children of your own, Mariamjo, but if you do I pray that God look after them and spare you the grief that I have known. I still dream of them. I still dream of my dead children.I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. I miss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling sh

I don't know if you have children of your own, Mariamjo, but if you do I pray that God look after them and spare you the grief that I have known. I still dream of them. I still dream of my dead children.I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. I miss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling sh

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 child

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 wo

The historian is a prophet looking backwards.

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

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.

Hindsight, I think, is a useless tool. We, each of us, are at a place in our lives because of innumerable circumstances, and we, each of us, have a responsibility (if we do not like where we are) to move along life's road, to find a better path if this one does not suit, or to walk happily along this one if it is indeed our life's way. Changing even the bad things that have gone before would fundamentally change who we are, and whether or not that would be a good thing, I believe, it is impossib

Now of course in hindsight, such a wonderful thing, though never around when you actually need it, I know that I always loved her deeply.

If there's anything worse in this world than a bad batch of babi guling, it's hindsight.

No one likes a person that "should of" all over the place.

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.

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

Distraught with the comprehension of his demise, a shovel stood dormant, in the ditch of her own digging. Now sheltered from the glare of greed and ambition, were the distasteful thoughts sprinkled in fool’s gold.

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.

I could think of no better place to secretly murder someone than inside a fridge. Well, actually there were probably several better ones, but none came to mind at the time.

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" )

Does being true to one's self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one's self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corners of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particle, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions - what happened and what might have hap

In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an in

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 to

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.

Heyday, now that is a funny word ain't it? Part of a heyday is, you don't never know you are having yourself one till later when it's all over with, long gone.

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.

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

I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence.

Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages

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

Educated idiots are the most fearsome creatures in a leadership structure because even though trained they still refuse to think.

The MistakeWith the mistake your life goes in reverse.Now you can see exactly what you didWrong yesterday and wrong the day beforeAnd each mistake leads back to something worseAnd every nuance of your hypocrisyTowards yourself, and every excuseStands solidly on the perspective linesAnd there is perfect visibility.What an enlightenment. The colonnadeRolls 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

War is an option of difficulties.

In 1867, George Campbell, Duke of Argyll, had published The Reign of Law, a book that Darwin found deeply annoying. A supporter of Richard Owen, Campbell argued that while evolution (or "Development") might be observable in the fossil record, it was merely evidence of God's purpose. God, for example, would cause horses and oxen to evolve in time to meet human needs. The brightly colored plumage of birds, Campbell went on, were simply God's decorations of nature for humanity's enjoyment.

A decision made during a moment of weakness can ruin your life.        To date, I had made three.

Hindsight is always easier than the dreadful moment of decision.

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

Our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened, and in so doing we ignore it as a moment which, at the time, is happening.

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.

It's so difficult, isn't it? To see what's going on when you're in the absolute middle of something? It's only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.

When I was four, I just wanted to drive, I collected toy cars. Where does that sort of thing come from? In hindsight you go, 'Oh, liked it because of this.' Maybe it's just the wheel.

People can do all kinds of things that maybe aren't wise in hindsight because of jealousy.