Hindsight Quotes

The tradition of freedom of the high seas has its roots in an era when there were too few people to seriously violate the oceans - but in hindsight that era ended some 150 years ago.

Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second-guessing is not a strategy.

Probably the most difficult scene to film was the one where I'm attacked. I haven't thought about it in a while because, in hindsight, you make jokes about it and you get funny stories from it. When I was talking about it earlier today, I started to realize that it took a couple days probably to get over. Even if you can laugh about it, it's still the physical things that your body has to go through, it's pretty insane.

Hindsight. It's like foresight without a future.

Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.

Hindsight is notably cleverer than foresight.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing but foresight is better, especially when it comes to saving life, or some pain!

Hindsight is good, foresight is better; but second sight is best of all.

The real trick in life is to turn hindsight into foresight that reveals insight.

The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.

But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.

I went through in the edits and cut tons of stuff that was "funny" because if it wasn't funny at the time, so it shouldn't be funny now. It's about having that unity of experience. You have to try and take away your hindsight knowledge of a situation.

From the hindsight of history George Washington seems larger than life, more statuesque than man. Too bad! Washington's greatness as a leader was courage under fire and persistence in the face of obstacles. Yet even he at times doubted himself. But he put those doubts aside and forged ahead, convinced of his noble purpose.

Presidents don't have the benefit of hindsight. You have to make difficult decisions based on the information that's before you at that moment.

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.

in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

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.

It's hard to see a river all at once, especially in the mountains. Down on the plains, rivers run in their course as straightforward as time, channeled toward the sea. But up in the headwaters, a river isn't a point where you stand. In the beginnings of the river, you teeter on the edge of a hundred tiny watersheds where one drop of water is always tipping the balance from one stream to another. History changes with each tiny event, shaping an outcome that we can only fully grasp in hindsight. And that view changes as we move farther downstream.

Hindsight is obviously a very great thing, but I'm always convinced that the reason that I didn't take as many politics or history classes is because I just didn't see any women. I didn't think when I was 13, 14 that that had anything to do with me. I just didn't see women in my textbooks.

And why do we worship hindsight (as in the news media's constant rehash of the day, the week, the year) and yet distrust foresight, which actually might make a difference in our lives?

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?

why does what was beautiful shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?

What does anyone really know about the impetus to go to war? And so much is uncovered in hindsight. And there are aspects of even past wars that are only coming out now. Historians discover letters here, notes there, and look very carefully at different aspects of not only any conflict but any great historical event.

I do not comment on my client's personal lives in the media. As for Luke, he did so once, a long time ago when he was an inexperienced, young actor and now with maturity and hindsight, he has learned not to engage the press in his personal life again.

For me, something that's been always really important to me, that's also really served me well in hindsight, is doing different things, trying to cross different genres, and dipping my toes into comedy and drama and action here and there. Fortunately, as I've been working, the industry has also changed where you're able to dip your toes into different mediums, where it's not just independent film and studio film, but now you've got TV, and you're able to do all these different things. For me, it's just a matter of continually pushing myself and challenging myself.

I suppose it’s true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. “M.A.S.H.” comes to mind. So does The Iliad.

With the benefit of hindsight, the content of that letter has bothered me since her death.

It's rather an exhilarating feeling. It's 6 or 7 when you get up and go out into the fields wearing your Wellingtons or high boots. You know that at this very hour half the nation does the same thing, which gives you, with the benefit of hindsight, a satisfaction in doing those things, too, a knowledge, a sense of the nation. I was a city boy until then.

Hindsight is common and bland as boiled potatoes.

I told personal stories the way [Bill] Cosby would spin a yarn for ten minutes. I think in hindsight it works better as a long story than as a condensed monologue.

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.

Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.

Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it's probably going to stay there.

Reality looks much more obvious in hindsight than in foresight. People who experience hindsight bias misapply current hindsight to past foresight. They perceive events that occurred to have been more predictable before the fact than was actually the case.

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

We will come to understand the part a difficult circumstance has played in our lives. Hindsight makes so much clear. The broken marriage, the lost job, the loneliness have all contributed to who we are becoming. The joy of the wisdom we are acquiring is that hindsight comes more quickly. We can, on occasion, begin to accept a difficult situation's contribution to our wholeness while caught in the turmoil.

Hindsight is a beautiful thing, mage. The past is for the memory, the present is for the mind.

It has been a mistake living my life in the past. One cannot ride a horse backwards and still hold its reins.

I believe in love in hindsight, meaning attraction and connection can be remembered as love at first sight. But how could you possibly know at first sight? That's too much pressure to put on a relationship.

Much of our understanding of God's action in our lives in achieved in hindsight. When a particular crisis or event in our life has passed we cry out in astonishment like Jacob, 'The Lord is in this place and I never knew it.

We talked about it. An assistant coach suggested fouling, but I rejected it because I was afraid we'd foul them shooting and get beat that way. Hindsight couldn't have been worse than what happened to us.

Oh! the wisdom, the foresight and the hindsight and the rightsight and the leftsight, the northsight and the southsight, and the eastsight and the westsight that appeared in that august assembly.

It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping: our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don't like to admit it, sometimes it's the only thing.

Today I got so annoyed with myself that I lost my patience and walked away from a game that, with hindsight, I should have continued [on quitting a game early on against Hendry]

For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.

Lifes That Way was an extraordinarily difficult book to write, because it wasnt 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.

It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection. It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.

Newspapers are busily experimenting with different models. Traditionally, and I suspect in hindsight very mistakenly, online news was free. And once given free access readers felt it was their entitlement.

It is easy to act as a Saturday morning quarterback and replay the game lost the night before. All of us seem to have better hindsight (the ability to see after the event what should have been done) than foresight

With hindsight, we recognize that the social and moral confusion of the late 1960s and early 1970s is part of a cultural cycle; we're in a similar time of upheaval now in the sense that the nation is divided upon itself, and some of the present schisms appear both terrifying and permanent. It's true that unless we learn from the past, we're condemned to repeat it.