Milan Kundera Quotes

We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

You usually can't tell what's inspiring until you look back on it.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

As a kid, you don't know what's going on at the time. But once you get older, you start to realize it.

Sometimes one misses the sign posts as you're going down the road. They aren't as obvious as they become when you get to the end of the road, so to speak.

There's a lot of clarity in hindsight.

Sometimes, hindsight is 20/20. Sometimes it takes another situation to kind of make you look back at a different situation and really see how good you had it, you know?

I find my past in my present, and from these forecast my future.

Life can only be understood backwards.

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

Reflective thinking turns experience into insight.

I can see that now. I can see everything once it’s already happened — I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.

Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.

All types of knowledge, ultimately mean self knowledge.

We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.

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

I have discovered nothing new; I have only perceived what I already knew.

So easy it is to see the errors of past ages, so difficult to acknowledge our own!

I learned from my past.

Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.

You know, now it's sinking in. It's taken me a long time to realize - and it is sinking in - how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I've done it such a long time ago.

Sometimes you don't understand what you're going through until you're on the other side of it.