23 Quotes About Hindsight

It is easy to be wise after the event. Arthur Conan Doyle

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 . R.A. Salvatore

In the argument over whether knowledge is power or ignorance is bliss, it seems I've always come down on the side of ignorance. And when that's the side you fall on, you don't realize it until it's too late. Abby Fabiaschi

But all these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event has justified them. If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousands and millions of suggestions and supposition are now forgotten that were current at the period, but have been shown by time to be unfounded and so have been consigned to oblivion. Leo Tolstoy

The historian is a prophet looking backwards. Friedrich Schlegel

You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire. Sarah Vowell

Does being true to one's self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one's self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corners of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particle, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions - what happened and what might have happened - come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight. Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story. Lynne Sharon Schwartz

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

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? . Kazuo Ishiguro

People change, though, especially after they are dead. Margaret Atwood

It's so difficult, isn't it? To see what's going on when you're in the absolute middle of something? It's only with hindsight we can see things for what they are. S.J. Watson

Our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened, and in so doing we ignore it as a moment which, at the time, is happening. Ian Mortimer

The greater number of a man's errors come before him disguised under the specious form of necessity; then, after error has been committed in a moment of excitement, of delirium, or of fear, we see that we might have avoided and escaped it. Alexandre Dumas

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

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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

I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence. Ansel Adams

I think there is no difference between love and infatuation. If it works out, we call it love; if it doesn’t, we shrug our shoulders and say it was infatuation. It’s a hindsight word. Deborah Meyler

Educated idiots are the most fearsome creatures in a leadership structure because even though trained they still refuse to think. Donavan Nelson Butler