
“Life is a succesion of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”
“Life is a succesion of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”
“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.
“Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward.”
Source: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay
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
Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter VIII, Unlimited Sequences Of Bernoulli Trials, p. 198.
Source: "‘Sexist’ female stand-up comedian Yang Li’s return sweeps Chinese social media again by gender issues" https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1231854.shtml?id=11 in Global Times (18 August 2021)