
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Variant: Life can only be understood going backward, but must be lived going forward.
Source: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Variant: Life can only be understood going backward, but must be lived going forward.
“Though life has to be lived forward, it can only be understood backwards”
Source: Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter
“Life can only be understood backward; the trouble is, it has to be lived forward.”
In The Light of what We Know (2014)
Journals IV A 164 (1843)
See Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, by Dermot Moran (2002)
Variants:
We live forward, but we understand backward.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s
“Life is like that. You live it forward but understand it backward.”
Variant: You live it forward, but understand it backward.
Source: Cutting for Stone
“The further backward you look, the further forward you can see.”
In Churchill by Himself (2008), Appendix I: Red Herrings, ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 577 ISBN 1586486381; “Commonly ascribed to WSC, even by The Queen (Christmas Message, 1999). What Churchill actually said was ‘The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward’”.
The attribution of the mistaken form of the quote to Churchill dates from at least 1959 https://books.google.com/books?id=QN3hAAAAMAAJ&dq=The+farther+backward+you+look%2C+the+further+forward+you+can+see&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22backward+you+can+look%22.
Misattributed