#retrospective

I've been asked to do a retrospective since I was about 28 and I always thought that was a bit odd. It's great to look forward as an artist because in the future the possibilities are infinite; you look back and it's all fixed so it's a scary thing. ↗

— Damien Hirst

#always #artist #asked #back #because

All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs. ↗

— Richard Le Gallienne

#book #each #eras #fear #history

It is a simple but sometimes forgotten truth that the greatest enemy to present joy and high hopes is the cultivation of retrospective bitterness. ↗

— Robert Menzies

#cultivation #enemy #forgotten #greatest #high

The retrospective glance is a relatively easy gesture for us to make. ↗

— George Crumb

#gesture #glance #make #relatively #retrospective

I get anxious about a lot of things, that's the trouble. I get anxious about everything. I just can't stop thinking about things all the time. And here's the really destructive part - it's always retrospective. I waste time thinking of what I should have said or done. ↗

— Hugh Laurie

#always #anxious #destructive #done #everything

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#before #being #complacency #exists #mind

But after this natural burst of indignation, no man of sense, courage, or prudence will waste his time or his strength in retrospective reproaches or repinings. ↗

— Robert Peel

#burst #courage #his #indignation #man

Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material success. All this can work, but also become a problem itself. The pursuit of happiness has even been put into the American constitution a couple centuries ago. Today we're so rich, we own much more than we need, we have liberties unknown before, even though they are endangered in the current political climate in the US - and we forget how wonderful it nevertheless is, compared to most other political and economic systems. We have a saying that goes: Give a man enough rope and he hangs himself. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#pain #relief #retrospectively-eerie-as-hell #religion

I thought it would be my one and only exhibition, so I decided to call it My Major Retrospective. ↗

— Tracey Emin

#decided #exhibition #i #major #only

What was I supposed to do then I wondered. Was there even a supposed-to for this kind of situation? A situation when when I looked at my receding past everything seemed retrospectively marked by an extreme order and predictability yet all moments since seemed to obey, and promised to continue obeying, their own set of stochastic, undisclosed, and undiscoverable laws. Where I was fully aware of the pitfalls and folly of a finely-tuned narcissism but still the known universe seemed to bend and bend inexorably inward and towards me where it awaited my next move, supremely ready to react accordingly. And how I knew that decisions I would soon make or defer would have near-Sophoclean import and yet nonetheless it all seemed oddly irrelevant. ↗

— Sergio De La Pava

#future #life #past #retrospective #uncertainly