“Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.”

— Abraham Verghese , book Cutting for Stone

Source: Cutting for Stone

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Abraham Verghese 20

Physician, teacher, novelist 1955

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“Life is like that. You live it forward but understand it backward.”

Abraham Verghese book Cutting for Stone

Variant: You live it forward, but understand it backward.
Source: Cutting for Stone

“The further backward you look, the further forward you can see.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

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

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

Eric Roth (1945) American screenwriter

Source: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay

“Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.”

Hanif Kureishi (1954) English playwright, screenwriter, novelist

Source: Collected Stories

“You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Letter to Monica Jones, 22 October 1967

“There is only one thing in your life YOU can be sure of. That one thing is this moment, now. The last moment has gone forever. The next moment has not come. YOU can become fully conscious only when you are living in the moment. To begin to live in the moment you have to know it exists and understand it. To understand it you have to observe it in relation to yourself and in relation to life. When you understand it, when you become conscious, you will see it is all that exists. To see this is to glimpse reality.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

“You can't go forward if you're looking backward. You run into walls that way.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Bloodfever

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

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Variant: Life can only be understood going backward, but must be lived going forward.

“Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

2000s, Address at Stanford University (2005)

“Though life has to be lived forward, it can only be understood backwards”

Adeline Yen Mah (1937) Author and physician

Source: Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter

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