“Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward.”

—  Eric Roth

Source: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay

Last update Nov. 18, 2022. History

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Eric Roth 9
American screenwriter 1945

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“It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

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Variants:
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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

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