Life is all about moving forward, but powerful ‘looking back’ quotes can give us life lessons and inspiring wisdom with reflection and retrospect, which can guide our way forward. These inspirational looking back quotes reveal the hidden power in reflection, offering invaluable lessons and insights.
Best Looking Back Quotes
Wisdom is looking back at your life and realizing that every single event, person, place, and idea was part of the perfected experience you needed to build your dream. Not one was a mistake. John Frederick Demartini
I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal. Haruki Murakami
Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things. Robert Breault
People will walk in and walk out of your life, but the one whose footstep made a long lasting impression is the one you should never allow to walk out. Michael Bassey Johnson
In looking back, I see nothing to regret, and little to correct. John C. Calhoun
We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing? Mitch Albom
You live life looking forward, you understand life looking backward. Soren Kierkegaard
Remorse is a terrible thing to bear, Pam, one of the worst of all punishments in this life. To wish undone something you have done, to wish you could look back on kindness to someone you love, instead of on unkindness that is a very terrible thing. Enid Blyton
Looking back we see with great clarity, and what once appeared as difficulties now reveal themselves as blessings. Dan Millman
If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn’t do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world. Damon Galgut
Looking back at my life’s voyage, I can only say that it has been a golden trip. Ginger Rogers
Life is our resume. It is our story to tell, and the choices we make write the chapters. Can we live in a way where we look forward to looking back? Matthew McConaughey
The years go by. The time, it does fly. Every single second is a moment in time that passes. And it seems like nothing but when you’re looking back well, it amounts to everything. Ray Bradbury
I don’t know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination. Jodi Picoult
It’s sad to know I’m done. But looking back, I’ve got a lot of great memories. Bonnie Blair
The past may or may not be a foreign country. It may morph or lie still, but its capital is always Regret, and what flushes through it is the grand canal of unfledged desires that feed into an archipelago of tiny might have beens that never really happened but aren’t unreal for not happening and might still happen though we fear they never will. And I thought of Ole Brit holding back so much, as we all do when we look back to see that the roads we’ve left behind or not taken have all but vanished. Regret is how we hope to back into our real lives once we find the will, the blind drive and courage, to trade in the life we’re given for the life that bears our name and ours only. Regret is how we look forward to things we’ve long lost yet never really had. Regret is hope without conviction, I said. We’re torn between regret, which is the price to pay for things not done, and remorse, which is the cost for having done them. Between one and the other, time plays all its cozy little tricks. André Aciman
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. Steve Jobs
The trouble with if only is that it doesn’t change anything. It keeps the person facing the wrong way backward instead of forward. It wastes time. In the end, if you let it become a habit, it can become a real roadblock an excuse for not trying anymore. Arthur Gordon
The only reason time seems to be moving rather fast is that sometimes we’re too busy living in the past. Dominic Riccitello
Yes, I’m looking at you, looking at me, looking at you, looking at me, looking back at you. Sammy Hagar
What if I can’t turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from. Wallace Stegner
When the most important times are occurring, we don’t even recognize them or notice. We are just busy living our lives. Only looking back do we know what was a great moment in our lives. Federico Fellini
Looking back, I have come to realize that the gang lifestyle back then the fame, the respect, and the recognition was stronger and powerful than any drug. We were serious with what we were dealing with. It was like a do or die situation. Shelton Apples Burrows reform gang leader. Drexel Deal
Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back. Joe Abercrombie
Memories. That’s all I have left. Memories of all the good I’ve done and all the bad too. Arti Manani
Too much looking backward is bad for progress. Henry Ward Beecher
If she had answered him honestly she would have said this To go back to the beginning. She would tell her thirteen year old self not to visit the woman. To her twenty five year old self Find Simon, forgive him. She would tell herself to take care of Klara, to sign up for JDate, to stop the nurse before she took the baby out of her arms. She’d tell herself she would die, she would die, they all would. She would tell herself to pay attention to the smell of Klara’s hair, the feel of Daniel’s arms as he reached down to hug her, Simon’s stubby thumbs my God, their hands, all of them, Klara’s hummingbird quick, Daniel’s slender and restless. She’d tell herself that what she really wanted was not to live forever, but to stop worrying. Chloe Benjamin
Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way. Edna Ferber
I’m tipping the hat and looking back. Robert Plant
I try not to think too much about those days now let the past be past. The truth is, we’re all prisoners of our historical context. Anybody who says morality is absolute, that right and wrong don’t change over time, you know what? They just haven’t lived long enough. Tom Perrotta
Looking back you realize that a very special person passed briefly through your life and it was you. It is not too late to find that person again. Robert Breault
Always try to keep one eye in back of your head. Will Leamon
You can’t look back; you have to keep looking forward. Lucy Liu
Funny how memories come back sometimes in dribs and drabs, sometimes in enormous sweeps. Sophie Kinsella
Avoid the trap of looking back unless it is to glorify God for what He has done. T. B. Joshua
I am constantly reflecting back on how I’ve done things and how those things have turned out. I like to think about the cause and effect of my decisions and the way that I have lived. Therefore, I am constantly assessing and evolving. It has been important to look back and say, This caused that, so don’t do that again. Or, This is helping move you forward in a nice trajectory; keep that up. Eric Overby
I always knew looking back on my tears would bring me laughter, but I never knew looking back on my laughter would make me cry. Cat Stevens
Each step we take back, is a moment in future we are losing. Joan Ambu
Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so. Ray Stannard Baker
You’ll discover for yourself soon enough the things that devastate us most in the moment are always the things we look back on with such gratitude. Rachel Harrison
They say not to look back, but if you’re not sure what lies ahead, what else is there but looking back? Laurell K. Hamilton
Memories have their purpose, and nostalgia is not a danger in small doses. It can be good to remember what has made us who we are, to reflect on what has made us stronger. Rachel Harrison
There’s only one boss in your life and that’s you! The person looking back in the mirror at you is the one you have to answer to every day. Wayne Dyer
Lost are the seekers of miracles. Only in the end, in the telling and re telling of the tale, is the miracle seen Life. Stewart Stafford
You can almost measure where you are in life by the degree to which you have begun looking back rather than ahead. Ted Koppel
And yet my life started here and stopped here one summer long ago, in this house, which no longer exists, in this decade, which slipped away so fast, with this never love that altered everything but went nowhere. André Aciman
Seems like the only one who doesn’t see your beauty is the face in the mirror looking back at you. Taylor Swift
There is a spot on via Santa Maria dell Anima that I revisit every time I’m in Rome. I’ll stare at it for a second, and suddenly it’ll all come back to me. I had just thrown up that night and on the way back to the bar you kissed me. People kept walking by but I didn’t care, nor did you. That kiss is still imprinted there, thank goodness. It’s all I have from you. This and your shirt. André Aciman
Fifty years, I hackneyed, is a long time. Not when you’re looking back at them, she said. You wonder how they vanished so quickly. Isaac Asimov
To look back, to go back, is not to be weak. It is not to reopen wounds. It takes strength, it takes courage. It takes a person who is more in control of who they are to cast a discerning, non judgmental eye over who they once were. Cecelia Ahern
What are you going to do? Are you going to keep looking backwards, full of anger, resentment and unfulfilled desire. Or are you going to be here now. Because everything is available for you in the here and now. Love, compassion, silence, bliss and Oneness. Leonard Jacobson
The whole thing was so intense, so full of hurt that when I look back at it I squint. I want it forgotten. Helen Oyeyemi
I’m not a great one for looking back. Ian Botham
We stood there for a few seconds where my father and I had spoken of Oliver once. Now he and I were speaking of my father. Tomorrow, I’ll think back on this moment and let the ghosts of their absence maunder in the twilit hour of the day. André Aciman
When you’re in your nineties and looking back, it’s not going to be how much money you made or how many awards you’ve won. It’s really what did you stand for. Did you make a positive difference for people? Elizabeth Dole
The most overcrowded vessel is the one that sails on the golden sea of memories. Stewart Stafford
You know, I try not to look back, because looking forward is so much better than looking backward. Jim Bakker
Remember who was there for you when you needed help. Mitta Xinindlu
She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph. I don’t know what she was, anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink, no looking down, or looking back. I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her. Charles Dickens
We only irritate ourselves when we scratch at an itch that no longer exists. Jason N. Versey
Looking back it’s hard to understand what all the fuss was about as things changed in just a few years. When you look at all the things that have happened in the world, it seems very small. Zola Budd
Looking back through life you will find the pleasure of achieving your dreams is always greater than the pain you met while achieving them. Moffat Machingura
Whatever we have done, we can always make amends for it without ever looking back in guilt or sorrow. Eknath Easwaran
For so many lifetimes, he lived in a state of perpetual regret, returning obsessively and destructively to better times, to moments he wished he could change. Most of those lives he lived staring into the rearview mirror. Blake Crouch
Almost all the people who’ve had the most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t but have met them. W. Somerset Maugham
It was more than disappointment, but I gained from it. I learned from it. I leaned into it to step out of it. You learn from different perspectives and to be given the chance to grasp them is beautiful. Dominic Riccitello
Sometimes, of all the people in the world, the one who is the hardest to forgive as well as perhaps the one who is most in need of our forgiveness is the person looking back at us in the mirror. Dieter F. Uchtdorf
The answers hardly seemed of consequence. Not much did. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen. Julian Barnes
Looking back, I wish I could bottle the stuff that made it better, but how can one bottle time? Scott Woods
Live Do everything in such a way so that if you look back in time, you shouldn’t say that if had a time machine i would’ve done it better. Immanuel Mohan
The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The Past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend. In the Past is no hope; The Future is both hope and fruition. The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot’s wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before. Herman Melville
Then the girl in the cafe taps me on the shoulder, I realise five years went by and I’m older, memories smoulder, winters colder, but that same piano loops over and over. Mike Skinner
Sooner or later we’ll be looking back on everything and we’ll laugh about it like we knew what all was happening. Michael Tolcher
When it’s a memory, you already know the outcome, so we believe it was an easier time. Looking forward is much more uncertain, and so feels more complicated. But I don’t think it is. Not really. Karen Hawkins
When we gaze at a star in the Milky Way which is 50,000 light years away from our sun, we are looking back 50,000 years in time. The idea is much too big for my little head. The only way we can look out into space, then, is to look back in time. We can never know what the universe is like now. We only know what it was like then. When we look up at a star that is thousands of light years away, we are really traveling thousands of years back in the history of space. Jostein Gaarder
Sometimes you look around the world, to see the dazzling walls and showering fountains of it, and feel like that today is the end and beginning at the same time. That’s the moment you discover something new of yourself. That’s love, cause and life. Sami Babar
At my age you find yourself looking back from time to time and you begin to appreciate some of the things that happened to you. Bob Dole
One of those fights that we’d been having a lot round about then. I thought they were all her fault. She seemed to think they were all mine. Keren David
Looking back at my younger self, that I’m not so different than I am now. I was always a seeker. I wanted very ambitiously to be a writer and what happened between now and then is that I continually threw myself in the way of those things that would help me become that, of doing and finding and learning from things that altered me along the way. Cheryl Strayed
I have been on the whole a lucky man. And I would say that even now. Perhaps especially I would say it now. Iris Murdoch
Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive leave that to the historians, who are looking backward. Josef Albers
If I weighed my actions further in the past, the regret might kill me. Flynn Berry
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous trembling, and halting. Friedrich Nietzsche
I wonder if this is the end, thought Ducane, and if so what it will all have amounted to. How tawdry and small it has all been. Iris Murdoch
Looking back on the production of Nevermind, I’m embarrassed by it now. It’s closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record. Kurt Cobain
Looking out of the back of your head is a way that some shamans describe the shamanic experience. Laurence Galian
Vonnegut could not help looking back, despite the danger of being turned metaphorically into a pillar of salt, into an emblem of the death that comes to those who cannot let go of the past. Kurt Vonnegut
You can only do what you’re capable of at the time. George Michael
From the outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Ray Bradbury
Perhaps the echoes of people we once loved still linger in the places we frequented with them and that is why we go back. Not so much to remember them as to feel them. Ranata Suzuki
Looking back, I guess I used to play act all the time. For one thing, it meant I could live in a more interesting world than the one around me. Marilyn Monroe
Wise is the one who flavors the future with some salt from the past. Becoming dust is no threat to the phoenix born from the ash. Curtis Tyrone Jones
Very quickly, without really looking back or trying, I was just suddenly lifted into another sphere. Diane Cilento
You will never see me surrender, never see me cry, but you will often see me walk away. Turn around and just leave, without looking back. Charlotte Eriksson
I don’t like looking back. Tommy Shaw
But it is perhaps not such a good idea to look back all the stories say so. Look what happened to Lot’s wife. Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Stephen King
Looking back on my career, I think I’ve been extremely fortunate to be in the right place at the right time in order to have the influence that I did. Peter Singer
The best way to look back at life fondly is to meet it and those along your journey warmly, kindly and mindfully. Rasheed Ogunlaru
It will be very interesting one day to follow the pattern of our life as it is spread out like a beautiful tapestry. As long as we live here we see only the reverse side of the weaving, and very often the pattern, with its threads running wildly, doesn’t seem to make sense. Some day, however, we shall understand. In looking back over the years we can discover how a red thread goes through the pattern of our life the Will of God. Maria von Trapp
Forget the past, it’s gone, but glance back occasionally to remind yourself where you came from and where you are going. Chloe Thurlow
I don’t much like looking back. Walter Hill
Looking back and wondering if it could have worked eventually hurts more than trying and failing. Dominic Riccitello
When you’re single, you go out and party and it’s fun, but in a relationship, you experience things together. It’s just sharing the memories and looking back on them together, remembering that it was an amazing time. And then thinking about it like it was just yesterday. Andrew W.K.
Don’t spend your life wondering what if and worrying over something you have no control. What’s done is done. Looking backwards will cause you to miss out on new blessings ahead. Move on. Germany Kent
If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and in many ways that was worse than finding out in the first place. Because if you were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and wondering what might have been. Nicholas Sparks
Already my childhood seemed far away a remote age, faded and bittersweet, like dried flowers. Did I regret its loss, did I want it back? I didn’t think so. Margaret Atwood
Blessed are those who have known meditation. Only those few people are the blessed people; others are simply groping in darkness. Meditation gives you an inner light, and then wherever you are there is light, and whatsoever you do, you do in full light and clarity. Hence there is never any guilt, no repentance, no looking back. Whatsoever one does, one feels that`s the only thing that can be done. It is always right. Rajneesh
You can never really know where exactly people are looking at! At the place they are staring at? Or at their past? Or at their future? Mehmet Murat ildan
The first time I made myself up, I was looking at my reflection in the mirror and it wasn’t me looking back. It allowed me to do things I couldn’t do as myself. I found out how powerful that was and how much that can mean to an actor. Rick Baker
All those practice fights when it was just us, two children pretending to be soldiers. Or two soldiers pretending to be children. Sara Raasch
Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels. Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields. Jackson Browne
When you look back at that relationship you didn’t think you could live without and realize had you stayed in it, you’d be some comfortable loser, sitting on the couch with another comfortable loser, instead of being the dope motherfucker you are today. Darnell Lamont Walker
Looking back upon my work today, I think the best I have done grew out of things deeply felt, the worst from a pride in mere talent. Diego Rivera
He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn’t help he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible. Milan Kundera
Every Jewish holiday has a religious significance, a historical significance, and a relevance to the time of year in the natural calendar of the seasons and trees and growing things, as well as a personal significance. So you are always looking backward, outward, inward, and forward. Marge Piercy
You could climb to the top of the world and jump into the deepest of ravines, but if you don’t have someone to share it with you’ll always be looking back. Saim Cheeda
I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack; The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back. Henry Van Dyke
Those who only look back at the past are certain to miss their future. Elle Sommer
When the Jew says mankind he is talking about himself. It is written in the Talmud, that only Jews were human beings, gentiles on the other hand were animals created to serve the chosen people. If looking back and comparing the corresponding articles in the democratic and neutral countries, one is astonished at the systematic nature of the propaganda whose final goal was the creation of a state of affairs in which a war was inevitable. Julius Streicher
Never back, never back! People don’t like going back, even if they must. I don’t like going back! And I’m not people! But I look back, sometimes, every so often, just to make sure I’m not leaving anything important behind. Like my tail! I can never be sure when I leave my tail behind me by mistake. Emory R. Frie