Hindsight Quotes

1. "I always enjoyed movies and in hindsight I realise how captivating they were to me."
Author: Adam Brody

2. "As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious."
Author: Adam Hochschild

3. "In the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight"
Author: Barbara W. Tuchman

4. "Hindsight is a beautiful thing, mage. The past is for the memory, the present is for the mind."
Author: Ben Galley

5. "We all pine for a time in life when things were simpler. Even when they weren't necessarily simpler, hindsight makes them look a lot simpler. The reality of it was that it wasn't."
Author: Ben Gibbard

6. "Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?"
Author: Bernhard Schlink

7. "Why does what was beautiful shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?"
Author: Bernhard Schlink

8. "In hindsight, the grand hero ideal she always thought he encompassed chipped away and all that remained was a cheap imitation. He embodied everything she'd hidden from in her adolescence. Boyfriends, relationships, and sex all led to disaster. Being alone was better than shattered and broken like mother: disenchanted with the life she'd been forced into."
Author: Callie Hunter

9. "When tadpole was born, I spent a sleepless night on the maternity ward gazing intently into her inky, newborn eyes, grappling to come to terms with the indisputable fact that this was an actual person looking back at me, not just a version of Mr Frog, or me, or both, in miniature. From the outset she seemed to know what she wanted, and I realised I could have no inkling of the paths she would choose to follow. But if I watch her life unfold carefully enough, perhaps I will see clear signposts pointing to who or what she will become.Because when I look backwards, ransacking my own past for clues with the clarity that only hindsight can bring, several defining moments do stand out. Moments charged with significance; snapshots of myself which, if I were to join the dots together, lead me unswervingly to where I stand today."
Author: Catherine Sanderson

10. "The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight."
Author: Clive James

11. "Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish."
Author: Daniel Kahneman

12. "Those who made the decisions with imperfect knowledge will be judged in hindsight by those with considerably more information at their disposal and time for reflection."
Author: Donald Rumsfeld

13. "Heart thoughts are profound, hindsight aches and hope is obscure. I'm craving a great adventure -- one that leads me back home."
Author: Donna Lynn Hope

14. "In hindsight, I have no idea why he was ever with me. He thought highly of my breasts. And . . . that's it, I think."
Author: Emma Forrest

15. "A statement about luck is a statement about the mind, not about the world... We find what seems to have been the lucky break or the big mistake, and so we thank our lucky stars that we took the road less traveled or curse the fates that sent that little wavelet that flipped us on our backs. With hindsight, we seem to see that everything preceding the pivotal point was leading up to it, tending toward it, and that everything following it grew from it.To any observer outside the lucky one himself, however, luck is simply chance. Chance is neutral."
Author: Eric Kraft

16. "Noooo," Cersei wailed, "Father help him, someone help him, my son, my son...'Tyrian found himself thinking of Robb Stark. My own wedding is looking much better in hindsight."
Author: George R.R. Martin

17. "It was dreadful, when she thought about it with the tiniest bit of hindsight, to admit this was the case. That a small part of herself was such a masochist, so enjoyed putting herself through all of this, that she liked hearing sad songs on the radio and staring gloomily out the window late at night. The tears in her eyes as she walked home of an evening, thinking about how much she loved him and how great they were together. It was so adolescent."
Author: Harriet Evans

18. "I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull."
Author: Helen Fielding

19. "Hindsight is wonderful. It's always very easy to second guess after the fact."
Author: Helen Reddy

20. "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."
Author: Henry Flynt

21. "Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice."
Author: Hilary Mantel

22. "To fulfill your vision, you must have hindsight, insight and foresight."
Author: Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

23. "We've all been guilty at one point or another in our careers of boasting of perfect hindsight. It's a terrible sin.If you don't make sure your questions and concerns are acted upon, it doesn't count."
Author: Jack Welch

24. "Hindsight can be merciless. People of any given era often look back in time and wonder how their predecessors could have been so dimwitted."
Author: James Balog

25. "It's a bit counter-intuitive to think about the future in terms of the past. But...I've learned an important trick: to develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight. Technologies, cultures, and climates may change, but our basic human needs and desires - to survive, to care for our families, and to lead happy, purposeful lives - remain the same.' p 5"
Author: Jane McGonigal

26. "Mom could say that in hindsight, but it seemed to me that when you were in the middle of something, it was awful hard to figure out what part of it was God's will and what wasn't."
Author: Jeannette Walls

27. "'Life's That Way' was an extraordinarily difficult book to write, because it wasn't written as a book. It was written as a journal of events that were happening as I wrote it, without the space or time either to digest or analyze those events and without the hindsight and peace that writing in the aftermath would have provided."
Author: Jim Beaver

28. "Hey! Remember the '90s?The Clintons were in office, everybody was using AOL, Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri did "the Cheerleaders" on SNL, and everybody thought Oasis was fantastic. In hindsight, we were all a bunch of potato-salad-eating jackasses."
Author: Julie Klausner

29. "Sometimes we make decisions because it seems to be the only path visible at the moment. It's only later that we see there was more than one path, but the others were blocked from our vision at the time. That's the thing with hindsight, you see. Even if you can see it clearly, there's no going back. It's at that point we need to turn around and stare ahead and make a new life."
Author: Karen White

30. "Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about."
Author: Kate Atkinson

31. "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."
Author: Kate Bosworth

32. "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?"
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

33. "Isobel looked down at her lap, at her hands. She turned her left one over, remembering where Varen had written his number on her that first time. Those numbers were gone now, but in hindsight, he may as well have tattooed the moment onto her soul."
Author: Kelly Creagh

34. "Umm," Jack said,reminding me that he was still standing beside me, "any ideas, Evie? I seem to be fresh out of baseball bats." Uber-vamp directed a chilling glare in Jack's direction. I inwardly cursed the idiot boy for bringing it up and putting himself in danger,too."I'm guessing you didn't bring your communicator.""In hindsight,not a clever move on my part."
Author: Kiersten White

35. "People can do all kinds of things that maybe aren't wise in hindsight because of jealousy."
Author: Kristin Bauer Van Straten

36. "Collecting intelligence information is like trying to drink water out of a fire hydrant. You know, in hindsight It's great. The problem is there's a million dots at the time."
Author: Louis Freeh

37. "(Peter) Easy to see in hindsight, but also easy to feel that, in another great city, on another continent, I was erasing her four years of unhappiness and setting her charmed life back on course."
Author: Nancy Woodruff

38. "He'd heard the saying hindsight was twenty-twenty, but that wasn't accurate. Hindsight was a stupid motherfucking asshole."
Author: Priscilla Glenn

39. "To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all."
Author: Queen Elizabeth II

40. "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 impossible to predict. So I take my past experiences... and try to regret nothing. -Drizzt Do'urden"
Author: R.A. Salvatore

41. "In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success."
Author: Reed Hastings

42. "As I have put it before, if the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we would none of us be here. We all can regard ourselves as exquisitely improbable. But here, in a triumph of hindsight, we are."
Author: Richard Dawkins

43. "I would be hard-pressed to look back at anything that I have done in my career and not say, 'I would have done that a little different' because hindsight is 20/20."
Author: Sam Huntington

44. "No. Real love takes time to build. What you feel is just infatuation. (Geary)But it doesn't feel temporary. (Arik)It never does at its onset. It's only in hindsight that we realize the difference between infatuation and love. (Geary)"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

45. "Your guess [about the future of technology] is as good as mine. The only thing I'm sure of is (a) most of the predictions I hear are almost certainly wrong, and (b) the things that will turn out to be important will come as a surprise, even though in hindsight they'll seem perfectly obvious."
Author: Steve Krug

46. "I once called the head of a network a liar. In hindsight, I should have called him an incompetent liar."
Author: Steven Levitan

47. "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."
Author: Ted Yoho

48. "And obviously, with hindsight now, now knowing what went on in the company, it would have been absolutely appropriate back then for us to have the chief executive of the company, most senior person in the United Kingdom, come and answer for the policy they were pursuing. And we ducked that, and frankly that's a failure of Parliament."
Author: Tom A. Watson

49. "...but hindsight and I have had lots of conversations about what happened..., most of which ends with me saying to hindsight, "Thanks for all the information, but you're a little late."
Author: Tori Spelling

50. "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."
Author: Vince Gill

Hindsight Quotes Pictures