“Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present. Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have made.”

— Bill Watterson

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present. Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have …" by Bill Watterson?

Bill Watterson photo

Bill Watterson 165

American comic artist 1958

Related quotes

“Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“For all of us, life presents challenges and suffering -- accidents, illnesses, the loss of loved ones. There are times when we are overwhelmed by sudden calamity, natural or manmade. All of us, we make mistakes. And at times we are lost. And as we get older, we learn we don’t always have control of things”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, Memorial Service for Fallen Dallas Police Officers (July 2016)
Context: For all of us, life presents challenges and suffering -- accidents, illnesses, the loss of loved ones. There are times when we are overwhelmed by sudden calamity, natural or manmade. All of us, we make mistakes. And at times we are lost. And as we get older, we learn we don’t always have control of things -- not even a President does. But we do have control over how we respond to the world. We do have control over how we treat one another.

“We all make mistakes at some time in our lives, some more than others. It is only when the cost is counted in human lives that people really take notice.”

Jasper Fforde book The Eyre Affair

Source: The Eyre Affair

“But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn’t it?”

Alexander McCall Smith (1948) British writer

and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.
Love Over Scotland, chapter 96.
The 44 Scotland Street series

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

The Operating Instructions in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004)

“But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn’t it? – and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.”

Alexander McCall Smith (1948) British writer

Love Over Scotland, chapter 96.
The 44 Scotland Street series

“We all make mistakes, some bigger than others, but none of us is perfect.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: One Hundred Names

“And suddenly the circle came together for me. We were as a civilization making one big mistake, a mistake that was understandable because we had been raised to make it. We had been culturally indoctrinated to believe it to be not a mistake at all, but rather a normal and healthy habit. But this mistake was killing us as individuals just as it was destroying our land and our forests and our rivers. We were eating dead animals, and it wasn't working. If those animals had set out to take their revenge on us, they couldn't have done a better job.”

Howard F. Lyman (1938) American activist

Source: Mad Cowboy (1998), Ch. 4: From the Farm to the Capital, pp. 80-81

“We all see these great calamities with different eyes, and so their impact upon us is different.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

The Path To Power (1995)

“Everyone's life is a mess. We all make mistakes… and not just little slip-ups. Major mistakes that hurt us and other people.”

James Alan Gardner Trapped

Source: Trapped

Related topics