Retrospect Quotes

1. "In retrospect, though many were guilty, none was innocent."
Author: A.J.P. Taylor

2. "Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect."
Author: Alan Greenspan

3. "The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear."
Author: Aldous Huxley

4. "But then over the years I spent time with her because of her, because in junior high school she drowned the dolls in chocolate pudding and called it 'Little People in Deep Shit: a Retrospective."
Author: Amy Stolls

5. "É muito difícil percebermos a nossa vida no momento que ela acontece. É só em retrospectiva que vimos a compreender aquilo que a nossa mente soubera desde sempre, não através de uma compreensão do universo, mas pela lenta acumulação de factos que o ser que vai despertando não tem coragem de aceitar"
Author: Ana Menéndez

6. "We write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely...When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing."
Author: Anaïs Nin

7. "I write romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
Author: Angeline M. Bishop

8. "Our sincere and innermost anxiety is not that we are insufficient. Our sincere and innermost fear is that we are prevailing and dominate. Our proficiency, not our incompetence is the misapprehension that most startles and worries us. It's when we contemplate in retrospect that we demand of ourselves why am I extraordinary, striking, talented, and remarkable? Essentially, Why can't you? A child of God blessed from the crown of you head to the soul of your feet. There is nonentity progressive about shrinking so individuals won't feel apprehensive around you. Every individual is predestined to shine. Humans were conceived to manifest the exaltation, magnificence, splendour, beauty or the glory of God imbedded in us . this gift is not some individual but in everyone"
Author: Archibald Gumiro

9. "Righteousness is easy in retrospect."
Author: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

10. "Ms. Wormwood: Calvin, can you tell us what Lewis and Clark did? Calvin: No, but I can recite the secret superhero origin of each member of Captain Napalm's Thermonuclear League of Liberty. Ms. Wormwood: See me after class, Calvin. Calvin: [retrospectively] I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information."
Author: Bill Watterson

11. "It was a happy day for me when that astronaut left the office, but in retrospect, I learned a lot from him. For example, that if you need to make a strong criticism, it's a bad idea to lash out wildly; be surgical, pinpoint the problem rather than attack the person. Never ridicule a colleague, even with an offhand remark, no matter how tempting it is or how hilarious the laugh line. The more senior you are, the greater the impact your flippant comment will have. Don't snap at the people who work with you. When you see red, count to 10."
Author: Chris Hadfield

12. "For this will to deceive that is in all things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies."
Author: Cormac McCarthy

13. "It would in retrospect appear to be a stop on a narrative path that was inevitable, but this is only because most events, most paths, feel inevitable in retrospect."
Author: Curtis Sittenfeld

14. "The basis of drama is ... is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realizes that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilization and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. The example Aristotle uses, of course, is Oedipus."
Author: David Mamet

15. "In retrospect, I now believe this expected donation of ten percent of income to the Fellowship was based on bad exegesis of an old Jewish taxation law that Jesus Himself seemed to completely ignore."
Author: Dylan Morrison

16. "The path of development is a journey of discovery that is clear only in retrospect, and it's rarely a straight line."
Author: Eileen Kennedy Moore

17. "Even a saint may take pleasure, in retrospect, in having been once desired"
Author: Ellis Peters

18. "It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door."
Author: Evelyn Waugh

19. "The retrospective glance is a relatively easy gesture for us to make."
Author: George Crumb

20. "Men can do nothing without the make-believe of abeginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to startwith a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars'unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that timeis at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always beenunderstood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appearsthat her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science,too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit intobillions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets offin medias res. No retrospect will take us to the truebeginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it isbut a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our storysets out."
Author: George Eliot

21. "In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world."
Author: Gloria Steinem

22. "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."
Author: Hugh Laurie

23. "Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilized existence. But it was not the core, whatever Dr. Leavis said in his lectures."
Author: Ian McEwan

24. "I didn't throw the paper away.Maybe I should have.Oh, the things you know in retrospect."
Author: Ilsa J. Bick

25. "Greatness has its beauties, but only in retrospect and in the imagination": thus wrote General Bonaparte to General Moreau in 1800. His observation helps to explain why the world, only a few years after sighing with relief at its delivery from the ogre, began to worship him as the greatest man of modern times. Napoleon had barely left the scene when the fifteen years that he had carved out of world history to create his glory seemed scarcely believable. Only the scars of the war veterans and the empty places in the widows' beds seemed to attest to the reality of those years, and time soon eliminated even these silent witnesses. What remained, in retrospect and in the imagination, was legend and symbol."
Author: J. Christopher Herold

26. "Frustration and I have become good friends. And like any friend who's a bad influence, frustration sometimes makes me do things that are, in retrospect, stupid. - Sirensong"
Author: Jenna Black

27. "The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells - caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls."
Author: John Hersey

28. "Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself."
Author: Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

29. "Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance."
Author: Kate Atkinson

30. "All you had to say was, 'I am a writer,' and you became one. You didn't even have to write anything. You could just sit in a coffee shop with a notebook and stare into space, with a slightly bemused look on your face, judging the weight of the world with a jaundiced eye. As you can see, you can be completely full of shit and still be a writer...I also thought it was going to be a great way to meet girls, but it wasn't--probably because as I was staring into space, I no doubt looked mildly retarded. You see, I wanted to write plays, which in retrospect is a lot harder than learning Mandarin, I think. How I ended up in this delusional state shall be saved for another time."
Author: Lewis Black

31. "I know you have not thought about it. Italians always act without thinking, it's the glory and the downfall of your civilisation. A German plans a month in advance what his bowel movements will be at Easter, and the British plan everything in retrospect, so it always looks as though everything occurred as they intended. The French plan everything whilst appearing to be having a party, and the Spanish...well, God knows. Anyway, Pelagia is Greek, that's my point."
Author: Louis De Bernières

32. "Love of my life. Love. Of. My. Life. A retrospectively absurd concept since the most I can say is that he was the love of a particular period of my life, and that it is the random vagaries of life itself, and never love, that define time limits. Meaning, to be in love and wish for its immortality is energy unwisely spent. The idea that we have any choice in the matter is the great illusion."
Author: Luke Davies

33. "The magus said thoughtfully, "That lying little monster complained about everything: the food, the horses, the blankets, the company. He even found fault with the stories I told by the fire but I cannot recall that he ever once complained about the climbing.""So many things are obvious in retrospect, aren't they?" I said."
Author: Megan Whalen Turner

34. "Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, retrospective explainability."
Author: Nicholas Nassim Taleb

35. "The dreams were the troubling kind where I thought the action and events were genuine while asleep; upon waking and in retrospect I realized they were obviously completely implausible.The one I remembered most intensely upon waking was about losing my teeth. The fragments of bone continually fell out of my mouth every time I opened it to speak; and they ran away- though they had no legs- which, in the dream, sent me into a panic.There is nothing quite like watching one's own legless teeth running away."
Author: Penny Reid

36. "I entered Princeton University as a graduate student in 1959, when the Department of Mathematics was housed in the old Fine Hall. This legendary facility was marvellous in stimulating interaction among the graduate students and between the graduate students and the faculty. The faculty offered few formal courses, and essentially none of them were at the beginning graduate level. Instead the students were expected to learn the necessary background material by reading books and papers and by organising seminars among themselves. It was a stimulating environment but not an easy one for a student like me, who had come with only a spotty background. Fortunately I had an excellent group of classmates, and in retrospect I think the "Princeton method" of that period was quite effective."
Author: Phillip A. Griffiths

37. "Solitude led to retrospective thinking, and if the past is what you are trying to get away from, then constant distractions in the present are needed."
Author: R.D. Ronald

38. "It was, I think in retrospect, the most dramatic individual personal act I have ever seen a soldier take. The mighty powers may try to cover up, but the little people can still sometimes win."
Author: Robert Fisk

39. "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."
Author: Robert Peel

40. "...stupidity is one of the two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances."
Author: Stephen King

41. "In retrospect, this seems to summarize all the insanity of that time. Guy is standing on top of a burning building. Helicopter arrives, hovers, drops a rope ladder. Climb up! the man leaning out of the helicopter's door shouts. Guy on top of burning building responds, Give me two weeks to think about it."
Author: Stephen King

42. "Well, she managed to - Barbara was capable of doing practically anything if she set her mind to it. In retrospect, I'm not surprised that Barbara managed to get collect calls through."
Author: Ted Olson

43. "There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it."
Author: Terry Eagleton

44. "I thought it would be my one and only exhibition, so I decided to call it My Major Retrospective."
Author: Tracey Emin

45. "When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235)"
Author: Victoria Moran

46. "Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

47. "The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

48. "We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

49. "Became one of the first fifty employees at Atari, working as a technician for $5 an hour. "In retrospect, it was"
Author: Walter Isaacson

50. "A time comes in the life of a man when all you do is reflect on retrospective actions and desire better outcomes in the future"
Author: Wogu Donald

Retrospect Quotes Pictures