Daphne Guinness Quotes

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

You ask people, 'should we go back to square one?' People don't want to do that.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

The further forward we go, the further back we have to explore in order to go forward again.

You've got to always go back in time if you want to move forward.

Fully consider the future and the immediate results of all undertakings, and the good and bad sides of all past actions.

You want a poem to unsettle something. There's a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do, which is to say, 'This is what you think you're certain of, and I'm going to show you how that's not enough. There's something more that might be even more rewarding if you're willing to let go of what you already know.'

The benefit of hindsight is we only really talk about those things that did work out.

The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.

I write a lot about the past because I really see things clearly in hindsight.

There are a lot of things that I'd do differently. But I can't imagine being more fortunate than I have been.

There's a lot of regrets about last year - maybe turning up was the biggest regret about it

You can't see the future through a rearview mirror

There are many things we only see clearly in retrospect.

There are those who never reason on what they should do, but what they have done; as if Reason had her eyes behind, and could only see backwards.

It's easy to look back and see it, and it's easy to give the advice. But the sad fact is, most people don't look beneath the surface until it's too late.

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.

I wonder if it's like this for mountain climbers, he thought. You climb bigger and bigger mountains and you know that one day one of them is going to be just that bit too steep. But you go on doing it, because it’s so-o good when you breathe the air up there. And you know you'll die falling.

Mr. [Richard M.] Nixon never has anything but hindsight.

I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary life time.

Any damn fool can predict the past.

Regret is a tricky word. Here's a big secret: nobody knows what wasn't.

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

The [travel] writer, looking back at the journey from a distance of a year or two (or three), is a different character from the hapless character who undertook the trip: wise after the event, with the leisure to tease out meanings from the experience that the distracted traveler never had, and often impatient with his alter ego's blinkered and unsatisfactory version of things.