Hindsight Quotes

I screeched with frustration, which in hindsight is never okay when there are people trying to kill you. ~ Jessica Fortunato

It's always so easy to say what everyone should have done when you know that what they actually did didn't work. ~ Fredrik Backman

(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. ~ Nancy Woodruff

No one believes he is an idiot until the consequences of his actions prove it. Then hindsight rubs it in. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Much like his birth, Cole's first hunting experience was a little more traumatic. He was give years old and we were getting ready to have our Christmas party at Phil's house in 2002. Because we hunt on private land, we're allowed to shoot deer from our vehicles. Cole and I climbed into my truck right before dark, and I drove next to the woods. As I was explaining safety and other things about hunting to him, a deer walked right into the middle of a trail. We hadn't been there for five minutes before the deer showed up! I looked at Cole and pointed toward the front of the truck.
Without saying anything, I leaned my gun out the driver's-side window of my truck and shot the deer. The deer did a double backflip and hit the ground. I looked at Cole and his mouth was wide open. I could have picked his jaw up from the floorboard.
"That's how you do it, son," I told him.
Cole didn't say anything. I figured his ears were still ringing, and I instantly regretted not telling him to cover them. It ended up being a pretty traumatic experience for him, and I feared he'd never want to go hunting again. In hindsight, he might have been a little too young to witness something like that. ~ Jase Robertson

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

Only in hindsight can we see the moments where our lives skewed off-course, where we traveled down the wrong path, where the worst lies we told were the ones we told ourselves. ~ Emma Shane

She wished she had known back then. Known that happiness isn't a point in time you leave behind. It's what's ahead of you. Every single day. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

The experience of redemption is to see differently in looking back," Reinders observes. "It is hindsight. ~ Anonymous

I have always wondered what it would have been like for an outsider to have witnessed firsthand the gathering dark of Hitler's rule. How did the city look, what did one hear, see, and smell, and how did diplomats and other visitors interpret the events occurring around them? Hindsight tells us that during that fragile time the course of history could so easily have been changed. Why, then, did no one change it? Why did it take so long to recognize the real danger posed by Hitler and his regime? ~ Erik Larson

Hindsight is pointless, Arnuff," said the other man in the room, who was equally as old as the first. "Bring me one of those," he said, referring to the drink Arnuff held. Arnuff poured another bourbon and brought it to the coffee table. ~ J.T. Bishop

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. ~ Sam Huntington

I heard someone say once that hindsight was a wonderful thing, that without it there would be no history. ~ Kate Atkinson

Think what you thought you knew, hindsight. Now as much as you think you know, you realize you don't, insight. Take heed to what you're abut to learn.
Foresight seen through the third eye, wide open to the light, the real lies are exposed then you realize you can see with your real eyes. ~ Jose R. Coronado

In hindsight everything is much clearer. ~ Bart Cummings

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. ~ Eric Foner

The wisdom of hindsight would reveal that I had no clue how to find myself, no idea how to love myself, and no ability to be myself. Mix all of those three dilemmas, and you've created a cocktail that will knock anyone out.

Even though I couldn't name those specific issues that night, I did own where I was to the best of my ability. That's often all we can do in a crisis. So that night, I looked myself in the eyes and said, "It isn't supposed to be this way. ~ Stephen Lovegrove

And if it does not seem possible to see between the myths, the heroes, the propaganda, the hindsight and the tall tales, then do not panic: this is the way the house of history is built, and you are already locked inside. The door has no key, and what you thought windows are simply finely drawn pictures, blurred from the touch of too many fingers. ~ Sam Meekings

I apologize to everyone who was offended by my insensitive tweet about the situation in Egypt. I've dedicated my life to raising awareness about serious social issues, and in hindsight my attempt at humor regarding a nation liberating themselves against oppression was poorly timed and absolutely inappropriate. ~ Kenneth Cole

Hindsight is common and bland as boiled potatoes. ~ Maureen Howard

But hindsight was no benefit to the ill-prepared. ~ Andrea K. Host

In hindsight, I realized I could see into the future. Which is kind of like having premonitions of flashbacks. ~ Steven Wright

In retrospect it becomes clear that hindsight is definitely overrated! ~ Sergio Aragones

. . . Orpheus struck dumb with hindsight. ~ A.E. Stallings

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. ~ Sheila Cassidy

Hindsight is of little value in the decision-making process. It distorts our memory for events that occurred at the time of the decision so that the actual consequence seems to have been a "foregone conclusion." Thus, it may be difficult to learn from our mistakes. ~ Diane F. Halpern

If we were able to live at the level of the soul all the time, there would be no need for hindsight to appreciate the great truths of life. ~ Deepak Chopra

Failure doesn't mean anyone did anything bad. Sometimes people fail even when they only do good things. Or they do what they think is good. Only with hindsight can anyone understand the failures they experience. ~ Miyuki Miyabe

When I was younger, I made some decisions that I shouldn't have. And, in hindsight, I've almost always been wrong when I haven't listened to myself. ~ Daniel Day-Lewis

She relived the frantic shopping and packing, the last teary gatherings with friends, the fear of a faceless roommate, the terror of academic failure. She also relived the excitement, because, in hindsight, going to college had been the single most pivotal point in her life. ~ Barbara Delinsky

As changes take place in my life, I continue to watch them truly work out for my good-if I can just wait on God to see me through. What makes all the difference is trust-the understanding that God has a much bigger plan than mine even if I don't understand it. I'm grateful, yet sorry, that I have had to learn so many lessons by hindsight. ~ Kathy Troccoli

In hindsight, I must have been looking for a way to write about Jewishness that somehow managed to minimize irony and self-deprecation. ~ Zachary Lazar

To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, I wish I had known this some time ago. ~ Roger Zelazny

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] ~ Ronnie O'Sullivan

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

Which is better: to dare to look directly into the blinding present, no matter how painful, or to await the detachment of hindsight -- which, being less painful, is more objective? ~ Thomas Buergenthal

'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. ~ Jim Beaver

Another Quarter Pounder sometimes seems like a good idea- but I always regret later. Only in hindsight do we see how God would not let us settle for our well-intentioned but limited desires, but called us- sometimes weeping and kicking- to something more enduring and satisfying. ~ Christopher Ruddy

I think I need to spend some time with safari but what arrests my attention are salient, sadomasochism, saccadic, and salad days. I think I will go learn more about coral only to learn a lot more about corollary and counterturn and coffin nail. I go from magnificence to means to marquee to maniac to distyle, ductile, hindsight, shell game, veronica, yardstick, ball field, magpie, variegated, and close shave. ~ Dara Wier

I don't think me walking away from modeling was scary for me. In hindsight, I think it was very risky, when you talk about risk. Because it paid the bills. ~ Tyra Banks

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. ~ Malcolm Turnbull

The little things we value as mundane or pithy usually turn into the big things in hindsight ... an "I love you" called out as the door closes, a walk around the same block with the same friend, Grandma's chocolate cake every time you visit ... the brush of skin on skin as two loves pause to breath in sync. Life isn't made up of miles, but memories. Cherish them while you're making them, not just after you can't make those memories anymore. ~ Toni Sorenson

Staff has a genius for sitting on its brains and coming up with perfect hindsight. ~ Leo Gordon

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. ~ Ben Gibbard

My hindsight seemed unbearably clear tonight. I could see every mistake I'd made, every bit of harm I'd done, the small things and the big things. ~ Stephenie Meyer

It's specifically this Z = 2^(Aleph0) that he couldn't prove. Ever. Despite years of unimaginable doodling. Whether it's what unhinged him or not is an unanswerable question, but it is true that his inability to prove the C.H. caused Cantor pain for the rest of his life; he considered it his great failure. This too, in hindsight, is sad, because professional mathematicians now know exactly why G. Cantor could neither prove nor disprove the C.H. The reasons are deep and important and go corrosively to the root of axiomatic set theory's formal Consistency, in rather the same way that K. Godel's Incompleteness proofs deracinate all math as a formal system. Once again, the issues here can be only sketched or synopsized (although this time Godel is directly involved, so the whole thing is probably fleshed out in the Great Discoveries Series' Godel booklet). ~ David Foster Wallace

This is easy to say with the benefit of hindsight, but I think it once again points out how very important style of leadership, that is the way he does what he does, is to his perception. ~ Robert Teeter

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

Heyday, now that is a funny word ain't it? Part of a heyday is, you don't never know you are having yourself one till later when it's all over with, long gone. ~ Lee Smith

In hindsight, I see it was my decision not to let go. I didn't know how, though some days I focused completely on it: using therapy, distraction, exercise. Other days I left myself wildly grieve. Finn affects it all: every conversation I have, what I choose to wear, what books I read, what films and shows I watch. There's that Buddhist quote, (S)he who angers you owns you. She owned me. I allowed it. She controlled me. I knew this feeling of misery would pass, that what I needed was time, but I was impatient. Unfortunately, we must live through the present to get to the future, writes Hanif Kureishi in his novel Intimacy. ~ Chloe Caldwell

Hindsight's a wonderful thing," Klara said. "If we all had it there would be no history to write about. ~ Kate Atkinson

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. ~ Marco Rubio

I came seriously close to getting married four times, and each time I backed off in fear or for one reason or another. Each occasion was different, but in hindsight when I look at the people involved, it wasn't a bad thing what I did. I think it may have been more complex had the marriage taken place. ~ Ratan Tata

In no issue of foreign policy could her prevarication and indecisiveness be said to have led to disastrous consequences for her country. On the international stage there was no better survivor. At home her achievement can only be judged with hindsight. A combination of good sense and longevity settled the church, and it was no fault of hers that confessional issues became so divisive forty years after her death. She gave her country pride, and set its commercial development on a course that was eventually to be spectacularly successful; for that she deserves more credit than she is usually given. ~ David Loades

Words evolve, perhaps more rapidly and tellingly than do their users, and the change in meanings reflects a society often more accurately than do the works of many historians. In he years preceding the first collapse of NorAm, the change in the meaning of one word predicted the failure of that society more immediately and accurately than did all the analysts, social scientists, and historians. That critical word? 'Discrimination.' We know it now as a term meaning 'unfounded bias against a person, group, or culture on the basis of racial, gender, or ethnic background.' Prejudice, if you will.

The previous meaning of this word was: 'to draw a clear distinction between good and evil, to differentiate, to recognize as different.' Moreover, the connotations once associated with discrimination were favorable. A person of discrimination was one of taste and good judgment. With the change of the meaning into a negative term of bias, the English language was left without a single-word term for the act of choosing between alternatives wisely, and more importantly, left with a subterranean negative connotation for those who attempted to make such choices.

In hindsight, the change in meaning clearly reflected and foreshadowed the disaster to come. Individuals and institutions abhorred making real choices. At one point more than three-quarters of the youthful population entered institutions of higher learning. Credentials, often paper ones, replaced meaning judgment ~ L.E. Modesitt Jr.

It's dangerous applying hindsight to something as complex as why someone wrote a poem, because the temptation is to try and make it make sense. We can apply reason, but what we can't do is apply the storms and variations that govern a human mind moment to moment. ~ Michael Poore

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. ~ Louis Freeh

In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists. ~ Larry Niven

Hindsight is always easier than the dreadful moment of decision. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

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. ~ Jacqueline Winspear

We, of course, have the power of hindsight in our arsenal, but people living in Berlin in that era didn't. What would that have been like as this darkness fell over Germany? ~ Erik Larson

I'm always surprised when the corporate world does stupid things, because they're often not very stupid in hindsight. ~ Penn Jillette

Beginnings are easier to find in hindsight ~ Natalie Corbett Sampson

This is the year 2020. We use the idea of 2020 to represent clear vision forward. We also use the idea of 2020 to talk about clear vision backward; 2020 hindsight. So the idea is that we're smack in the middle of the idea of the past and the future. And 2020 represents our opportunity to really see clearly what we've chosen in the past and really apply that clearly to what we prefer in the future. ~ Darryl Anka

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. ~ John Whisenant

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

You have to read scripts and audition and develop relationships. It takes a long time to develop a body of work but over the last 25 years I guess I've done that many movies. In hindsight it may seem effortless, but there's a lot of work that goes into it. ~ Harry Connick, Jr.

Wow. Hindsight didn't just make things crystal clear; it smacked me upside the head and knocked some sense into me. "I get it."

"I don't think you do. This" - he gestured impatiently at himself - "is just a fucking shell. You're what drives me, Eva. Can you understand that? You're my heart and soul. If something ever happened to you, it would kill me, too. Keeping you safe is goddamned self-preservation! Tolerate it for me, if you won't do it for yourself."

I surged into him, knocking him off-balance and onto his back. I kissed him hard, my heart pounding and blood roaring in my ears. "I hate to freak you out," I muttered between desperate kisses, "but you've got it real bad for me. ~ Sylvia Day

Public life...lacks coherence and drama. (History, by contrast, attains coherence and drama only in hindsight.) ~ Michael Wolff

This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was - or is. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field ... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight. ~ Tom Stoppard

The bad press came because they thought I should fight more. I couldn't get the fights because if I would sign to fight one of King's guys I would be signed to him. I chose not to do that. In hindsight, that might have been a mistake. ~ Gerry Cooney

Tragedies in hindsight look like farces. ~ Julian Barnes

The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias. ~ Daniel Kahneman

Frankly, to be honest, I hadn't worked for two years before 'Murphy Brown.' It's a nice illusion now to think of all of us as terribly successful and talented people at the top of our profession, but that's hindsight. I had to pray for a job like this. ~ Charles Kimbrough

You'd think hindsight would do us some good
But all it does sometimes
Is add glass to the kaleidoscope ~ J.D. Estrada

Imagine taking a test knowing the answer. While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward. Why is it so? We will discuss the point in Chapter 11 but here is a possible explanation: Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny. If they were made for us to understand things, then we would have a machine in it that would run the past history as in a VCR, with a correct chronology, and it would slow us down so much that we would have trouble operating. Psychologists call this overestimation of what one knew at the time of the event due to subsequent information the hindsight bias, the "I knew it all along" effect. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We had more in common than I thought we did. You were my priority. You were your priority. ~ Kate McGahan

Was happiness (which was perhaps achieved not by getting what you wanted, but rather, by obtaining what you didn't know you wished for until it was in hand) a hologram that would continually change appearance with the slightest shift of perspective? Or maybe happiness by definition was a temporary state of being recognizable only in hindsight. It was impossible to catch what always managed to be overrun and end up in the rear view mirror. ~ Roy L. Pickering Jr.

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

Weirdest things in life are how people always create lofty ideals for you yet set average standards for themselves. People have always judged me above standard because of my brilliance not understanding that I came from unborn opportunities like them and was never in my estimation given any special tools for them to expect more from me than they expect from themselves. In hindsight people only place you on a pedestal so they can in the end tear you down.
We spend our entire lives judging ourselves against others. If we measure people and they fall short we believe we are license to
Insult them and tear them down. If they buoy on a float of accomplishments, we begin to feel small within ourselves and murmur about our own inadequacies. ~ Crystal Evans

One little thing led to another. One success, one particular challenge, could spur thoughts about another product, or a different iteration of an existing product, or a whole new channel of revenue. As Steve liked to say, "You can only connect the dots of how things really happened in hindsight. ~ Brent Schlender

The most fertile source of insight is hindsight. ~ Morris Kline

The tragedy of hindsight is that it always come too late. ~ Marilyn L. Rice

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. ~ Carol Shields

Hindsight is an exact science. ~ Guy Bellamy

We may be grown-up biologically, but in terms of a spiritual journey, we are children. When you were a child, you probably felt much more grown up with each year that passed. But with hindsight, it is easy to see that at each age we were still immature in ways that we did not suspect. The same thing with our spiritual maturity: it is a lifetime-project! ~ Dana Williams

Hindsight must surely be the most useless function of the human brain, torturing yourself over the unalterable past. ~ Peter F. Hamilton

But that's hindsight for you: never there when you need it. ~ Janet Givens

The lightning bugs are back. They fly low to the ground as the lawn dissolves from green to black in the dusk. Seeing them, I can reconstruct a childhood: a hot night under tall trees; the Good Humor man, in his square white truck, the freezer smoky when he reaches inside for an ice cream.
The lightning bugs trapped in empty jars with holes on top. "Let them out," our mother said, "or they will die in there." We were careless. We always
forgot to open the jars. The bugs would be there in the morning, their yellow tails dim in the white light of the summer sun, pathetic as they lay on
their backs. We were always horrified by what we had done. As night fell we shook them out and caught more.
I relive the magic of the yellow light without the bright white of hindsight. The little flares in the darkness, a distillation of the kind of life we think we had, we wish we had, we want again. ~ Anna Quindlen

Hindsight is not 20-20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. ~ Ed Catmull

No one likes a person that "should of" all over the place. ~ Shannon L. Alder

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. ~ Henry Flynt

No captain with all the hindsight in the world can predict how the wicket is going to play ~ Trevor Bailey

You did the best you could with the knowledge you had in that moment. It's easier to look back at an event and see a better choice or pathway because we already learned from our experience. Hindsight happens after the lesson, so we can't condemn ourselves for not knowing the lesson before we learned it. ~ Emily Maroutian

It can be shown that maximum diversification is achieved by holding each stock in proportion to its value to the entire market (italics added) ... Hindsight plays tricks on our minds ... often distorts the past and encourages us to play hunches and outguess other investors, who in turn are playing the same game. For most of us, trying to beat the market leads to disastrous results ... our actions lead to much lower returns than can be achieved by just staying in the market. ~ Jeremy Siegel

Self-preservation - this is your new focus.
The only obligation of today is to preserve the breath of tomorrow. Then, once footing is regained, you can begin to fulfill debt obligations.
Debt is hindsight. ~ John-Talmage Mathis

Life-changing moments are sneaky little bastards. Often we don't even know that nothing will ever be the same until long after, only in hindsight can we look and say "There! That was it! That changed everything. ~ Annie Bellet

Why was it in hindsight you could see the cracks in a foundation you'd have otherwise thought was solid and smooth? ~ R.J. Lewis

The most difficult problems lead to the greatest insights; but often in hindsight! ~ Nalin Singh