These backward quotes will inspire you. Backward, toward the back, to or toward what is behind or opposite to the usual way or directed behind or to the rear or having made less than normal progress.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging backward quotes, backward sayings, and backward proverbs.
Best Backward Quotes
- “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “Don’t go backwards – you’ve already been there.” ~ Ray Charles
- “Learn to see things backwards, inside out, and upside down.” ~ John Heider
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“Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Never look backwards or you’ll fall down the stairs.” ~ Rudyard Kipling
- “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” ~ Steve Jobs , Looking backward quotes
- “Optimist: Someone who figures that taking a step backwards after taking a step forwards is not a disaster. It’s a cha-cha.” ~ Robert Breault
- “Begin with the end in mind. Start with the end outcome and work backwards to make your dream possible.” ~ Wayne Dyer
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“Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “Life can only be understood backwards.” ~ Mackenzie Astin
- “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” ~ Lewis Carroll
- “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “We can no longer stand at the end of something we visualized in detail and plan backwards from that future. Instead we must stand at the beginning, clear in our mind, with a willingness to be involved in discovery… it asks that we participate rather than plan.” ~ Margaret J. Wheatley
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“I’m at the point where going forward is easier than going back.” ~ Alice Hoffman
- “There is a period in life when we go backwards as we advance.” ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- “You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “I hope to stand firm enough to not go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country’s cause.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
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“Backwards understood be only can but, forwards lived be must life.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “When I go forwards, you go backwards
And somewhere we will meet.” ~ Thom Yorke - “If you forget you have to struggle for improvement you go backward.” ~ Geoff Hickson
- “In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.” ~ George Orwell
- “Always, our eyes look backwards with the conviction that then, and not now, was the golden age.” ~ Esther Meynell
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“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” ~ Edmund Burke
- “I know that mess spelled backwards is ssem and I felt much better armed with that information.” ~ Tori Amos
- “After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.” ~ Ann Richards
- “Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards.” ~ David Lodge
- “The world is so ass-backwards it almost makes you wish you were dyslexic.” ~ Dennis Miller
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“In my next life I want to live backwards. Start out dead and finish off as an orgasm.” ~ Woody Allen
- “The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary all backward — there-is-no-global-warming — rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled.” ~ Frank Schaeffer
- “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long.” ~ Walt Disney
- “Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard , Backward quotes in life
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“‘Dammit I’m mad’ is ‘Dammit I’m mad’ spelled backwards.” ~ Demetri Martin
- “Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.” ~ Carl Jung
- “There must not be a canon of orthodoxy where art is judged and measured. The culture cannot move forward with our heads turned backwards.” ~ Paul Russo
- “I think with the advent of Reagan, and subsequently, both parties, there’s been a strong move towards the advantage given to the richer people, in taxation and grants and supplements and things of that kind. Primarily exacerbated more recently by the Supreme Court’s stupid ruling on Citizens United, and now there’s a massive flood of money into the political system that I think has subverted the essence of a moral and ethical standard that used to permeate American democracy. Now it’s not an admirable process. I think we’ve gone backwards.” ~ Jimmy Carter
- “People always joke that ‘dog’ spells ‘god’ backwards. They should consider that it might be the higher power coming down to see just how well they do, what kind of people they are. The animals are right here, right in front of us. And how we treat these companions is a test.” ~ Linda Blair
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“I think backwards. “This was beautiful.” Instead of forward.” ~ Alice Herz-Sommer
- “You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness.” ~ D. H. Lawrence
- “When young Galileo, then a student at Pisa, noticed one day during divine service a chandelier swinging backwards and forwards, and convinced himself, by counting his pulse, that the duration of the oscillations was independent of the arc through which it moved, who could know that this discovery would eventually put it in our power, by means of the pendulum, to attain an accuracy in the measurement of time till then deemed impossible, and would enable the storm-tossed seaman in the most distant oceans to determine in what degree of longitude he was sailing?” ~ Hermann von Helmholtz
- “I didn’t want to teach my kid how to read, so I used to read to him at night and close the book at the most interesting part. He said, “What happened then, daddy?” I said, “If you learn to read, you can find out. I’m too tired to read. I’ll read to you tomorrow.” So, he had a need to want to learn how to read. Don’t teach children how to read. Don’t teach them mathematics. Give them a reason to want it. In school, they’re working ass-backwards.” ~ Jacque Fresco
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“I can no longer face life, so I’ve decided to go through the rest of it backwards.” ~ Ashleigh Brilliant
- “On quiet nights, when I’m alone, I like to run our wedding video backwards, just to watch myself walk out of the church a free man.” ~ Jim Davidson
- “I walked home, seeing all my doubt from the other side. Have you ever seen that? Like when you go on holiday. On the way back, everything is the same but it looks a little different than it did on the way. It’s because you’re seeing it backwards.” ~ Markus Zusak
- “Both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporary suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me but have this and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “When you break up the individuals from a community into individual units, they become disempowered because it’s the collective consciousness and the collective energy of the group from which power comes. The principal driving force that lies before us is that we have to recognize the nature of community as the evolutionary step that we just took a step backwards from in the last century.” ~ Bruce H. Lipton
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“If you stand still there is only one way to go, and that’s backwards.” ~ Peter Shilton
- “The best way to be future-friendly is to be backwards compatible.” ~ Jeremy Keith
- “There is no straight path from your seat today to where you are going. Don’t try to draw that line. You will not just get it wrong, you’ll miss big opportunities. And I mean big-like the Internet. Careers are not ladders, those days are long gone, but jungle gyms. Don’t just move up and down, don’t just look up, look backwards, sideways around corners. Your career and your life will have starts and stops and zigs and zags. Don’t stress out about the white space-the path you can’t draw- because there in lies both the surprises and the opportunities.” ~ Sheryl Sandberg
- “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.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “The average prison term for a convicted murderer in America is 6.5 years. The average tenure for a member of Congress is 13 years. We’ve got it backwards. We are giving early release to the wrong criminal class.” ~ Pat Robertson
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“The first movie I saw – and I don’t know if it influenced me – was ‘Ben Hur’.” ~ Roberto Benigni
- “I think every writer should have tattooed backwards on his forehead, like ambulance on ambulances, the words ‘everybody needs an editor.” ~ Michael Crichton
- “It seems the whole works of humankind are backwards. Most are trying to convince, instruct, and purify everyone else – without first purifying themselves. To enlighten others we have to enlighten ourselves.” ~ David Wolfe
- “A man with a half volition goes backwards and forwards, and makes no way on the smoothest road; a man with a whole volition advances on the roughest, and will reach his purpose, if there be even a little worthiness in it. The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder – a waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life and having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.” ~ Terry Eagleton
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“I always [or “often”] walk slowly, but I never walk backwards.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “Ken Griffey changed the game, but he also represented pop culture and the youth – how he wore his hat backwards, how he swung the bat and walked off…he brought energy to the game, class to the game. He was kind of the first person I really watched. He was a big influence.” ~ Russell Wilson
- “I’ve lived my career backwards – I started off huge and I’ve got smaller and more personal, and I’m much more comfortable now.” ~ Charlie Simpson
- “To me, photography is 90% a retrospective experience. There’s the part of pursuing the image, and exposing the film, but once you make the exposure, you’re always looking backwards in time. I like that aspect of photography.” ~ John Sexton
- “Going back to a simpler life is not a step backwards.” ~ Yvon Chouinard
- “If you go through the pearly gates backwards in a fireball, that’s a cool way to die!” ~ Jeremy Clarkson
