quotations about hindsight
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.
JAMES FENTON
Out of Danger
When we're in the story, when we're part of it, we can't know the outcome. It's only later that we think we can see what the story was. But do we ever really know? And does anybody else, perhaps, coming along a little later, does anybody else really care?
JAMES ROBERTSON
And the Land Lay Still
Hindsight, or our ability to see our past clearly, is a learning function that, when damaged ... renders us unable to look at the past to guide ourselves through the present and into the future. Without this ability, we cannot learn from our mistakes. We cannot clean up the wreckage of our actions. We are locked into a cycle of repeating the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. This is commonly known as the definition of insanity.
BARBARA S. COLE
The Gifts of Sobriety
The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.
MORRIS KLINE
Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty
Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise.
DAVID ZINDELL
The Broken God
The historian is a prophet looking backwards.
FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL
Philosophical Fragments
Hindsight wisdom is of no use.
INDIAN PROVERB
Hindsight is good, foresight is better, but second sight is the best of all.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Maybe hindsight isn't what you think, Mr. Palmon. Maybe it's already in the DSMV. In bits and pieces, partial descriptions. This person hears voices. That person's delusional. The crazy on the corner insists she's seven different people. Maybe it's an atypical presentation of something unusual.
MINDY TARQUINI
Hindsight: A Novel
Hindsight is not necessarily the best guide to understanding what really happened. The past is often as distorted by hindsight as it is clarified by it.
AMOS ELON
The Pity of It All
Hindsight is not only clearer than perception-in-the-moment but also unfair to those who actually lived through the moment.
EDWIN S. SHNEIDMAN
Autopsy of a Suicidal Mind
We will come to understand the part a difficult circumstance has played in our lives. Hindsight makes so much clear. The broken marriage, the lost job, the loneliness have all contributed to who we are becoming. The joy of the wisdom we are acquiring is that hindsight comes more quickly. We can, on occasion, begin to accept a difficult situation's contribution to our wholeness while caught in the turmoil.
KAREN CASEY
Each Day a New Beginning
If hindsight of some women was as good as their foresight, they wouldn't be wearing slacks.
ANONYMOUS
It is easy to be wise after the event.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
But as the reflected space-energy pool moves through the stages of re-re-reflection as re-re-creation, this momentary sense of delay or hindsight is elongated; developing the notion of supervision and control, allowing for comparisonism to flourish into self degrading reflected energy concepts, degrading first creation re-creation fulfillment. For in truth; violation of a concept, which is in the never-ending process of becoming, cannot take place except through hindsight of creation; through the reflection delay.
GARY WARREN
Aware
If I had to live my life again I'd make all the same mistakes--only sooner.
TALLULAH BANKHEAD
attributed, The Little Book of Wrinkles
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 that fled.
CHARLES MACKAY
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
There's many a forward look in a backward glance.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Well, as we all know by now, hindsight is twenty-twenty, but it is possible to turn your hindsight into foresight.
ELLEN MOORE
Good Books Lately
Hindsight provides new eyes.
WAYNE W. DYER
You'll See It When You Believe It