Everything that happens to us can be looked at as a gift. Although it's quite difficult when you're in the middle of a hard struggle with something, it's hard to see it as a gift, but in retrospect, we can almost always look back and say, "Oh, I see why I had to go through that. "
People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.
The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?
You can't explain success in retrospect. The moment you leap into the void, that moment is impossible to negate, after success.
Perspective will come in retrospect.
I have never heard anyone say This is it. I know right now is the high point of my life. It will never get any better. Only in retrospect do we recognize the best times and of course then it is too late.
That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.
Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?
. . . stupidity is one of the two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.
So my first experience was that I had to do a reboot of my expectations. Like fantastic, great, he's young and charismatic and I was like wow, this is so disorienting, I have to reboot. In retrospect, I can see that it's really powerful that somebody [Snowden] so smart, so young, and with so much to lose risked so much.
It was not until some weeks later that I realized there is no need to restrict oneself to 2 by 2 matrices. One could go on to 4 by 4 matrices, and the problem is then easily soluable. In retrospect, it seems strange that one can be so much held up over such an elementary point. The resulting wave equation for the electron turned out to be very successful. It led to correct values for the spin and the magnetic moment. This was quite unexpected. The work all followed from a study of pretty mathematics, without any thought being given to these physical properties of the electron.
In retrospect, I think maybe Audrey Hepburn was going to talk to me about doing something for UNICEF. I was so overwhelmed to just even be in her presence and I was very young, but it was really special and unforgettable.
People always understand everything in retrospect.
In retrospect I wrote things about my life and my family's existence, I realized that it was a frighteningly harsh way to make a living. And I used to say that they were slowly dying trying to make a living.
I might say that in retrospect, looking at where the community college system is today, I think we may have gone too far. The community college system is so big, so broad, so consuming of tax money.
I really tend to write in retrospect.
You’re the one who unleashed him. (Savitar) Yeah, well, let’s move on from the blame game. I was having suicidal thoughts and it seemed like a good idea at the time. In retrospect, not so much. (Stryker)
I think in retrospect that all those 'alternative'modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development.
The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it's almost always only in retrospect that we know which is which.
I felt that, in retrospect, there was a time in the late Seventies, after I had a string of hits and successes, as a performer and a recording artist, that I wasn't saying anything.