No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.
The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.
Study the past, if you would divine the future.
The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. . . No man is so wise but that he may learn some wisdom from his past errors, either of thought or action, and no society has made such advances as to be capable of no improvement from the retrospect of its past folly and credulity.
Hindsight is notably cleverer than foresight.
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
Everybody looks back on what they studied and what they grew up with.
Every year at this time I join a growing number of journalistic flagellants in enumerating things that I got wrong in the previous annum's worth of columns.
You look back and you remember the good, the bad and the ugly.
I think my Wallander stories give a fairly good image of the world in the 1990s. I don't regret anything about that - on the contrary!
I remember everything from 1976. I remember I was 14, and I remember my routines.
The best prophet of the future is the past.
The spring, summer, is quite a hectic time for people in their lives, but then it comes to autumn, and to winter, and you can't but help think back to the year that was, and then hopefully looking forward to the year that is approaching.
I write a lot about the past because I really see things clearly in hindsight.
An Olympic medal won't define my whole life, although it might look like it to onlookers. When I look back, I should have been able to get an Olympic medal.
One thing I really envy about my friends who have kids is that as their children develop, they're able to revisit their own developmental stages and recognise themselves and undo a lot of things they decided.
Achievements are often more interesting to you when you look back on them.
Life must be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards.
I thought if I looked back and evaluated my life, it would help me in the future.
It was a mistake. I was wrong, but I discovered this many years later. I was acting on the basis of this mandate given me by the most important leaders of the world: President Bush's father, prime minister of France, President Mitterand, the Chinese, everybody.
Being in The Beatles was a short, incredible period of my life. I had 22 years leading up to it, and it was all over eight years later.
It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
I think I was going through a lot of change at 27, but I didn't know it was happening until it was over.
I just can't believe all the things I did that decade.
When I look back at some of the Chicks stuff, it's the early stuff we did where we kind of giggle and go, 'You know what? Those were the good old days.'
