Grace Paley Quotes

The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.

There's a lot of clarity in hindsight.

The wise form right judgment of the present from what is past.

By how much one man has more experience of things past, than another, by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him.

The past has infinite value if one learns from it.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.

Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past, Wisdom is of the future.

Any 6 year old’s hindsight is better than a President’s foresight.

The further backward we look, the further forward we are likely to see.

I'm always wary of the lessons of the past. There's a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

I can't change history but only learn from it.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

Wisdom before experience is only words; wisdom after experience is of no avail.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

You definitely pick stuff up when you go back and listen to older material.

I actually don't think that I'm that much smarter than anybody else. It's just that I frequently just seem to know what to do, and I think that's wisdom.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.

Let no one trust so entirely to natural prudence as to persuade himself that it will suffice to guide him without help from experience.

I think you accidentally learn things in high school that turn out to be life lessons when you are able to step back a bit and study them in more depth.

Experience is that marvelous thing that enable you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better.

To profit from good advice requires more wisdom than to give it.

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.