“It's of no use to look back and say, "I should have been different." At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see. For that reason, guilt is always inappropriate.”

Source: Nothing Special

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It's of no use to look back and say, "I should have been different." At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we…" by Charlotte Joko Beck?
Charlotte Joko Beck photo
Charlotte Joko Beck 1
US American Zen Teacher 1917–2011

Related quotes

Kurt Vonnegut photo

“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.”

Billy writing a letter to a newspaper describing the Tralfamadorians
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Context: The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

Blaise Pascal photo
Ivica Dačić photo

“There is no doubt that we have a different vision of the past. What’s important is that I see no reasons for any kind of conflicts in the future. We have no interests that could be contradictory in the future.”

Ivica Dačić (1966) Serbian politician

Source: "Ivica Dacic: Forced solutions don’t lead to stability of the region" in The Srpska Times https://thesrpskatimes.com/ivica-dacic-forced-solutions-dont-lead-to-stability-of-the-region/ (18 September 2018)

Francisco Franco photo

“The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn't necessarily be.”

David Hockney (1937) British artist

From a series of interviews with Marco Livingstone (April 22 - May 7, 1980 and July 6 - 7, 1980) quoted in Livingstone's David Hockney (1981) , p. 112
1980s
Context: When conventions are old, there's quite a good reason, it's not arbitrary. So Picasso discovered that, as it were, and I'm sure that for him that was probably almost as exciting as discovering Cubism, rediscovering conventions of ordinary appearance, one-point perspective or something. The purists think you're going backwards, but I know you'd go forward. Future art that is based on appearances won't look like the art that's gone before. Even revivals of a period are not the same. The Renaissance is not the same as ancient Greece; the Gothic revival is not the same as Gothic. It might look like that at first, but you can tell it's not. The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn't necessarily be.

Wallace Stevens photo

“We reason of these things with later reason
And we make of what we see, what we see clearly
And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure

Harper Lee photo
Kate Bush photo

“We used to say
"Ah Hell, we're young"
But now we see that life is sad
And so is love.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Red Shoes (1993)

Ludwig Wittgenstein photo

Related topics