Retrospect Quotes - Page 5

• The last of Summer is Delight -
  Deterred by Retrospect.
  'Tis Ecstasy's revealed Review -
  Enchantment's Syndicate.
  
  To meet it - nameless as it is -
  Without celestial Mail -
  Audacious as without a Knock
  To walk within the Veil.

  Emily Dickinson

  Summer, Enchantment, Delight

  Emily Dickinson, “The Last Of Summer Is Delight”

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• September's Baccalaureate A combination is Of Crickets - Crows - and Retrospects And a dissembling Breeze That hints without assuming - An Innuendo sear That makes the Heart put up its Fun And turn Philosopher.

  Emily Dickinson

  Fun, Heart, Crow

  Emily Dickinson, Cristanne Miller (2016). “Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them”, p.516, Harvard University Press

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• I did all the stuff that people do - film, performance, photography, pictures and words, words and pictures. In retrospect, I was trying to find some way to put things - meaning images and forms - together that highlighted some idea of what was underneath the surface of an image, what determined how something was seen.

  David Salle

  Photography, Ideas, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, exploring and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called “licking the earth.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Exercise, Vanity, Self

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• When I first heard about Y Combinator, it was one of those ideas that just seemed forehead-slappingly obvious. Good ideas often do, in retrospect.

  Mark Fletcher

  Ideas, Firsts, Obvious

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• I was stuck in the feeling that one did not--was not justified in being alive unless one was fulfilling other people's dreams, whether they were contractual dreams or the public's dreams, or fulfilling my own dreams and illusions about what I thought I was supposed to be, which, in retrospect, turned out to not be what I am.

  John Lennon

  Dream, People, Feelings

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• In retrospect, our triumphs could as easily have happened to someone else; but our defeats are uniquely our own.

  Mignon McLaughlin

  Triumph, Defeat, Happened

  "The Complete Neurotic's Notebook". Book by Mignon McLaughlin, 1981.

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• Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on for ever, and a kind of tamped-down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect; you are barely conscious of it while you have it.

  Fay Weldon

  Loneliness, Giving, New Day

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• The first time I ever performed spoken word poetry in front of a big crowd, it totally failed. It ended, people barely clapped...in retrospect the poem was terrible. And for a while I thought this was something I would never do again. And then I realized that, in my 17-year-old head, that was the worst it could have been. And it wasn't that bad - [because] from there, it could only get better. And I think that failure kind of freed me up to explore and not be afraid of failing again.

  Phil Kay

  Thinking, Years, People

  Source: saseye.com

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• We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Country, Dog, Book

  Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated”, p.253, Vintage

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• I mourn my old life here. We barely scraped by, but I knew where I fit in, I knew what my place was in the tightly interwoven fabric that was our life. I wish I could go back to it because, in retrospect, it seems so secure compared to now, when I am so rich and famous and so hated by the authorities in the capitol.

  Suzanne Collins

  Wish, Fabric, Fit

  Suzanne Collins (2011). “The Hunger Games Trilogy”, p.494, Scholastic Inc.

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• In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.

  Gloria Steinem

  Mother, Years, Twenties

  Gloria Steinem (2012). “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions”, p.211, Open Road Media

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• The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way-- a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable

  Robert James Waller

  August, Strange Places, Way

  The Bridge of Madison County (pp. 22-3)

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• In retrospect Hank I don't know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album.

  John Green

  Book, Writing, Years

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• Freedom... refer[s] to a social relationship among people-namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect.

  Thomas Sowell

  Freedom, People, Decision

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• Seen in retrospect, evolution as a whole doubtless had a general direction, from simple to complex, from dependence on to relative independence of the environment, to greater and greater autonomy of individuals, greater and greater development of sense organs and nervous systems conveying and processing information about the state of the organism's surroundings, and finally greater and greater consciousness. You can call this direction progress or by some other name.

  Theodosius Dobzhansky

  Simple, Names, Independence

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• No thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Love, Thoughtful, Men

  Woodrow Wilson (1915). “When a man comes to himself”, p.12, Рипол Классик

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• When seen in retrospect, fashions seem to express their era. Although it is more difficult to draw conclusions from contemporary clothes, the same principles which hold for the clothes of the past must hold for clothes of the present and the future.

  James Laver

  Fashion, Past, Clothes

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• When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine - like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.

  Mary McCarthy

  Pain, Memories, Thinking

  "How I Grew". Book by Mary McCarthy, 1987.

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• A graceful and blessed old age must have three elements in it: a happy retrospect, a peaceful present, and an inspiring future. And old age cannot have either one of these three if the youth has been wasted and manhood has been misspent.

  Lyman Abbott

  Blessed, Peaceful, Age

  Ernest Hamlin Abbott, Lyman Abbott, Francis Rufus Bellamy, Hamilton Wright Mabie (1898). “The Outlook”

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• The reader can test his own psychology by asking himself whether he would consider, in retrospect, the selling at 156 in 1925 and buying back at 109 in 1931 was a satisfactory operation. Some may think that an intelligent investor should have been able to sell out much closer to the high of 381 and to buy back nearer the low of 41. If that is your own view you are probably a speculator at heart and will have trouble keeping to true investment precepts while the market rushes up and down.

  Benjamin Graham

  Heart, Intelligent, Thinking

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• As a child I was attracted to Tarzan and everything that had to do with jungles. It seemed to me -- and this is in retrospect -- that there was something primal, something right about it. Tarzan represented a pure being, somehow before the fall.

  Jean Liedloff

  Children, Fall, Primal

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• There are plenty of dead scientists I admire, but I can't think of any living ones. This is probably because it is only in retrospect that one can see who made the important contributions.

  Stephen Hawking

  Thinking, Important, Scientist

  "Gods of science: Stephen Hawking and Brian Cox discuss mind over matter". The Guardian Interview, www.theguardian.com. September 10, 2010.

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• Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.

  George Eliot

  Beautiful, Children, Happy Times

  George Eliot (2016). “George Eliot's Life, Complete: Top Novelist Focus”, p.50, 谷月社

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• Of no day can the retrospect cause pain to a good man.

  Martial

  Pain, Men, Good Man

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