Looking Back Quotes

We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks—we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?

~ Mitch Albom

Wise is the one who flavors the future with some salt from the past. Becoming dust is no threat to the phoenix born from the ash.

~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

Sometimes I really can't express how much I feel, but I can tell for a fact that some past years have been a victorious rollercoaster ride with God in it. Some days colourful, some days black and white, some days faith bigger than a mustard seed, other days I'm filled with blind doubt about what tomorrow holds. But in all of this, I'm beautifully me and constantly running the race through the father's grace

~ Temitayo Olami

People will walk in and walk out of your life, but the one whose footstep made a long lasting impression is the one you should never allow to walk out.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Don't spend your life wondering what if and worrying over something you have no control. What's done is done. Looking backwards will cause you to miss out on new blessings ahead. Move on.

~ Germany Kent

When you look back at that relationship you didn't think you could live without and realize had you stayed in it, you'd be some comfortable loser, sitting on the couch with another comfortable loser, instead of being the dope motherfucker you are today.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Have you ever felt you were born in the wrong decade, or came just a bit too late and missed out on all the good stuff when it was in its heyday?

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

The best way to look back at life fondly is to meet it - and those along your journey - warmly, kindly and mindfully

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

Looking back and wondering if it could have worked eventually hurts more than trying and failing.

~ Dominic Riccitello

Turn to your community and the great earth for sustenance and knowledge.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Taking time to look back, is a foundation on course to build a stable future.

~ Unarine Ramaru

Amazing what more we can see looking back. But God didn't give us eyes in the back of our heads. Our eyes, like our feet, face forward, toward the future.

~ Regina Scott

If you’re always looking back at what you’ve lost, you’ll never discover the treasure that lies just up ahead.

~ J.e.b. Spredemann

We look back on our life as a thing of broken pieces, because our mistakes and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have accomplished and attained.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible.

~ Milan Kundera

Do you think the memory of someone should dictate how we live going forward?' he asks, threading and unthreading his fingers together.'It depends,' I say. 'I think you can probably honor someone's memory, but you can't live for them, because that means living in the past.

~ Alexandra Bracken

Fantasies... who needs fantasies? I have memories.

~ B.j. Neblett

Remorse is a terrible thing to bear, Pam, one of the worst of all punishments in this life. To wish undone something you have done, to wish you could look back on kindness to someone you love, instead of on unkindness - that is a very terrible thing.

~ Enid Blyton

You could climb to the top of the world and jump into the deepest of ravines, but if you don’t have someone to share it with you’ll always be looking back.

~ Saim Cheeda

I understand true life doesn't happen when I constantly gaze backwards, mulling over all the injustices others have done or I have done to others.

~ Mary E. Demuth

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

~ Jodi Picoult

Never back, never back!... People don’t like going back, even if they must. I don’t like going back! And I’m not people! But I look back, sometimes, every so often, just to make sure I’m not leaving anything important behind. Like my tail! I can never be sure when I leave my tail behind me by mistake.

~ Emory R. Frie

Those who only look back at the past are certain to miss their future.

~ Elle Sommer

You can never really know where exactly people are looking at! At the place they are staring at? Or at their past? Or at their future?

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

It isn't as important to feel great about all the things we do. But how we feel toward the end when we look back at everything we've done.

~ Jessica Sorensen

I've never looked forward before. I've always looked back. I think about the past way too much and I think about what I should have done and everything I did wrong and I've never once looked forward in my life.

~ Colleen Hoover

I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.

~ Haruki Murakami

If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.

~ Damon Galgut

All those practice fights when it was just us, two children pretending to be soldiers. Or two soldiers pretending to be children.

~ Sara Raasch

I assumed that looking back reminded older guys of what they had shot at and missed, the what-ifs, the good memories, the bad, the people left behind, the people who moved on.

~ Dan Groat

Some memories were all right, but others were dangerous.

~ Stephen King

Whether beautiful or terrible, the past is always a ruin.

~ Matthew Flaming

Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward.

~ Nina Sankovitch

It's funny. Looking back, none of it seems to matter now, those moments of yearning, craving to belong with people I thought mattered. No more fragments of glass, pieces of a broken mirror you can't put back together and wouldn't want to even if you could.

~ Rebecca Harris

Looking back, I have come to realize that the gang lifestyle back then—the fame, the respect, and the recognition—was stronger and powerful than any drug. We were serious with what we were dealing with. It was like a do or die situation. Shelton ‘Apples’ Burrows reform gang leader

~ Drexel Deal

when you get to the peak, remember the valley exists

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

They say to never look back.But sometimes I do. It’s gratifying to see how far I’ve come.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Mattie was a grown woman in love, and they had to let her go, with their blessing, enduring what could not be helped. And there was no use in thinking of that fluid, glistening instant that always seems, in looking back, to have come between what might have happened and what happened, when one might have made some little choice that would have changed forever the course of things.

~ Wendell Berry

The trouble with ‘if only’ is that it doesn’t change anything. It keeps the person facing the wrong way – backward instead of forward. It wastes time. In the end, if you let it become a habit, it can become a real roadblock – an excuse for not trying anymore.

~ Arthur Gordon

Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now.What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now?

~ Bill Shapiro