Backwards Quotes

• Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Love, Life, Positive

  The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1844.

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• The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

  Winston Churchill

  Leadership, Moving Forward, Patriotism

  35 Copy quote

• Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Life Is, Understood

  37 Copy quote

• Don't go backwards - you've already been there.

  Ray Charles

  110 Copy quote

• Learn to see things backwards, inside out, and upside down.

  John Heider

  Upside Down

  John HEider (2015). “The Tao of Leadership: Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching Adapted for a New Age”, p.36, Green Dragon Books

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• You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

  Steve Jobs

  Change, Success, Trust

  Commencement Address at Stanford University, delivered 12 June 2005, Palo Alto, CA

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• Never look backwards or you'll fall down the stairs.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Fall, Learning, Looks

  145 Copy quote

• There is a period in life when we go backwards as we advance.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Periods

  10 Copy quote

• Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Motivational, Courage, Regret

  167 Copy quote

• Begin with the end in mind. Start with the end outcome and work backwards to make your dream possible.

  Wayne Dyer

  Dream, Spiritual, Mind

  33 Copy quote

• Optimist: Someone who figures that taking a step backwards after taking a step forwards is not a disaster. It's a cha-cha.

  Robert Breault

  Dance, Steps, Disaster

  7 Copy quote

• Life can only be understood backwards.

  Mackenzie Astin

  Short Life, Moving Forward, Reflection

  "Fictional character: David Shrader". Dream for an Insomniac, www.imdb.com. 1996.

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• It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

  Lewis Carroll

  Memories, Carpe Diem, Vision

  Through the Looking-Glass ch. 5 (1872)

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• We can no longer stand at the end of something we visualized in detail and plan backwards from that future. Instead we must stand at the beginning, clear in our mind, with a willingness to be involved in discovery... it asks that we participate rather than plan.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Discovery, Mind, Vision

  72 Copy quote

• I'm at the point where going forward is easier than going back.

  Alice Hoffman

  Moving On, Moving Forward, Novelists

  Alice Hoffman (2012). “Green Heart”, p.93, Scholastic Inc.

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• Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

  Aldous Huxley

  Mean, Technology, Progress

  Aldous Huxley (1937). “Ends and Means: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization”, p.9, Transaction Publishers

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• It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Past, Thinking, Law

  R. Buckminster Fuller (1982). “Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking”, p.278, Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

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• Backwards understood be only can but, forwards lived be must life.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Creativity, Understood

  5 Copy quote

• I hope to stand firm enough to not go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Hope, Country, Wrecks

  Abraham Lincoln (2008). “The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln”, p.24, Wildside Press LLC

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• You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

  Steve Jobs

  Success, Trust, Karma

  Commencement Address at Stanford University, delivered 12 June 2005, Palo Alto, CA

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• 'Dammit I'm mad' is 'Dammit I'm mad' spelled backwards.

  Demetri Martin

  Mad

  12 Copy quote

• In my next life I want to live backwards. Start out dead and finish off as an orgasm.

  Woody Allen

  Want, Next, Next Life

  72 Copy quote

• In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.

  George Orwell

  Art, World, Futuristic

  George Orwell (1983). “1984”, p.418, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If you forget you have to struggle for improvement you go backward.

  Geoff Hickson

  Motivational, Struggle, Self Improvement

  51 Copy quote

• When I go forwards, you go backwards
  And somewhere we will meet.

  Thom Yorke

  "Song: 'Electioneering'". 1997.

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