“Whose yesterdays look backwards with a smile.”
Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night II, Line 334.
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Edward Young 110
English poet 1683–1765Related quotes
“And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope.”
"The Death of the Hired Man" (1914)
1910s
Variant: And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.
Love is Enough (1872), Song VIII: While Ye Deemed Him A-Sleeping
Context: All wonder of pleasure, all doubt of desire,
All blindness, are ended, and no more ye feel
If your feet treat his flowers or the flames of his fire,
If your breast meet his balms or the edge of his steel.
Change is come, and past over, no more strife, no more learning:
Now your lips and your forehead are sealed with his seal,
Look backward and smile at the thorns and the burning.
— Sweet rest, O my soul, and no fear of returning!
“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”
Volume iii, p. 274
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
“I'd rather look forward and dream, than look backward and regret.”
Source: Unfinished Business: What the Dead Can Teach Us About Life
“I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.”
15 January, 1849. As quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell The life of Charlotte Brontë (1870), p. 285
Source: Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It (1993), p. 128
“Great families of yesterday we show,
And lords whose parents were the Lord knows who.”
Pt. I, l. 374.
The True-Born Englishman http://www.luminarium.org/editions/trueborn.htm (1701)
“Determinism looks backwards to the causes of the present state, not forward to the consequences.”
Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 22 “Free Will” (p. 307)
“There are certain wives whose confinement makes sarcastic celibates smile.”
Il y a des femmes dont la grossesse fait sourire quelque célibataire sournois.
Part I, Meditation II: Marriage Statistics http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Physiology_of_Marriage/Part_1/Med_2
Physiology of Marriage (1829)