#hindsight

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

#history-of-mankind #reflection #age

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

— Melika Dannese Lux

#corcitura #danger #eric-bradburry #hindsight #hybrid-vampires

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 infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#important #past #turning-points #wistful #dreams

If Henry Adams, whom you knew slightly, could make a theory of history by applying the second law of thermodynamics to human affairs, I ought to be entitled to base one on the angle of repose, and may yet. There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you -- a train, say, or the future -- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don't find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#life #life

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

— Rasheed Ogunlaru

#conditioning #cultural-differences #foresight #hindsight #motivational-quotes

I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull. ↗

— Helen Fielding

#dull #first #get #had #hindsight

I began demonstrating against serious culture. In hindsight, the actual course of events has been very humiliating for me, because no one picked up on the intellectual critique I made. ↗

— Henry Flynt

#against #because #been #began #course

Whether it is successful or not is not the exercise for me. It is not up to me. It is out of my hands now. I am not going to in two years have hindsight and say I made a big mistake. ↗

— Vince Gill

#big #big mistake #exercise #going #hands

Hindsight is always easier than the dreadful moment of decision. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#eena #hindsight #richelle #richelle-goodrich #richelle-goodrich

At the time, when you're being dissected and judged it's pretty brutal, but in hindsight it's great and - it sounds cliched - you do come out the other side better and stronger. ↗

— Kate Bosworth

#better #brutal #cliched #come #dissected