
“I look forward and see myself look back.”
Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991)
Source: Hidden Order - How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), Ch 3. Echoing Emergence, p. 97
“I look forward and see myself look back.”
Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991)
“The further backward you look, the further forward you can see.”
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
Speech By Mr. S. G. Page, Government Pleader, High Court, Bombay, Made On Monday, 28 September, 1992
"The Regressive Method of Discovering the Premises of Mathematics" (1907), in Essays in Analysis (1973), pp. 273–274
1900s
“We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain.”
Source: 1950's, In: Reminiscence and Reverie, 1951, p. 231
“If you can see, look. If you can look, observe.”
Se podes olhar, vê. Se podes ver, repara.
Epigraph
Blindness (1995)
The Poverty of Historicism (1957) Ch. 29 The Unity of Method
Context: If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.