“Determinism looks backwards to the causes of the present state, not forward to the consequences.”
Matt Ridley book Genome
Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 22 “Free Will” (p. 307)
“Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.”
"James Clarence Mangan" (1902)
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James Joyce191
Irish novelist and poet 1882–1941Related quotes
“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
“And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope.”
Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet
"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.
“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”
Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France
Volume iii, p. 274
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
“I'd rather look forward and dream, than look backward and regret.”
James Van Praagh (1958) American psychic
Source: Unfinished Business: What the Dead Can Teach Us About Life
“I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) English novelist and poet
15 January, 1849. As quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell The life of Charlotte Brontë (1870), p. 285
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
(18th August 1822) These from a prose sketch - Isadore
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822
Jomo Kenyatta (1893–1978) First prime minister and first president of Kenya
(1964) Post-election statement. Virginia Morell, Ancestral Passions: The leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings, Copyright 1995, Chapter 19, beginning.
“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’”. <br class="br">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. <br class="br">Misattributed
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist
Letter to E. Ray Lankester (11 April 1892) Huxley Papers, Imperial College: 30.448
1890s