These hindsight quotes will inspire you. Hindsight understanding of a situation or event only after it has happened or developed.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging hindsight quotes, hindsight sayings, and hindsight proverbs.
Best Hindsight Quotes
- “Hindsight is a wonderful thing.” ~ David Beckham
- “After the event, even a fool is wise.” ~ Homer
- “With the benefit of hindsight, had more care been taken, maybe this could have been avoided” ~ Eason Jordan
- “Hindsight is an exact science.” ~ Guy Bellamy
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“The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.” ~ Margaret Thatcher
- “Hindsight is wonderful. It’s always very easy to second guess after the fact.” ~ Helen Reddy
- “Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 – 20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.” ~ Robert M. Pirsig , Hindsight quotes 20 20
- “To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past, I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.” ~ Queen Elizabeth II
- “The real trick in life is to turn hindsight into foresight that reveals insight.” ~ Robin Sharma
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“In hindsight, I wish I had done more.” ~ Joe Paterno
- “Reality looks much more obvious in hindsight than in foresight. People who experience hindsight bias misapply current hindsight to past foresight. They perceive events that occurred to have been more predictable before the fact than was actually the case.” ~ Hersh Shefrin
- “Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.” ~ Billy Wilder
- “At the time, when you’re being dissected and judged it’s pretty brutal, but in hindsight it’s great and – it sounds cliched – you do come out the other side better and stronger.” ~ Kate Bosworth
- “It’s so difficult, isn’t it? To see what’s going on when you’re in the absolute middle of something? It’s only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.” ~ S.J. Watson
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“Collecting intelligence information is like trying to drink water out of a fire hydrant. You know, in hindsight It’s great. The problem is there’s a million dots at the time.” ~ Louis J. Freeh
- “In hindsight, it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.” ~ Larry Niven
- “Hindsight provides new eyes.” ~ Wayne Dyer
- “Hindsight is not only clearer than perception-in-the-moment but also unfair to those who actually lived through the moment.” ~ Edwin S. Shneidman
- “Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
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“Hindsight is illuminating but not always what we want to see.” ~ Kylie Minogue
- “Hindsight is not necessarily the best guide to understanding what really happened. The past is often as distorted by hindsight as it is clarified by it.” ~ Amos Elon
- “Of all the forms of wisdom, hindsight is by general consent the least merciful, the most unforgiving.” ~ John Fletcher
- “I think it is only in hindsight that you can determine whether something is a mistake or not.” ~ Scott D. Anthony
- “Hindsight is an exact science. Hold fast to your dreams, for it dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
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“Yes, there are times when you regret your decisions but we all have to make them without the power of hindsight.” ~ Roland Gift
- “Only in hindsight do we understand how God intended a problem for good.” ~ Rick Warren
- “If you reflect on your life, you may recall times when you couldn’t see the value of some person and were tempted to brush him or her off. It takes hindsight to recognize that the very situation you may have seen as an irritating bother turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Wouldn’t life be a much more enjoyable and meaningful experience if we decided to look at the difficult people and irritating situations as blessings in disguise? If we look deeply enough, we might see how these experiences as situations that motivate us to grow and change for the better.” ~ John Templeton
- “But everyone’s an expert with the virtue of hindsight . . . .” ~ Kate Morton
- “To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” ~ Roger Zelazny
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“If we were able to live at the level of the soul all the time, there would be no need for hindsight to appreciate the great truths of life.” ~ Deepak Chopra
- “I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “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.” ~ Kazuo Ishiguro
- “in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight” ~ Barbara Tuchman
- “Hindsight is good, foresight is better, but second sight is best of all.” ~ Evan Esar
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“It is easy to act as a Saturday morning quarterback and replay the game lost the night before. All of us seem to have better hindsight (the ability to see after the event what should have been done) than foresight” ~ Carlos E. Asay
- “When I was younger, I made some decisions that I shouldn’t have. And, in hindsight, I’ve almost always been wrong when I haven’t listened to myself.” ~ Daniel Day-Lewis
- “The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.” ~ Morris Kline
- “Ultimately, we are all products of the experiences we have and the decisions we make as children, and it remains a peculiar detail of human condition that something as precious as the future is entrusted to us when we possess so little foresight. Perhaps that’s what makes hindsight so intriguing. When you’re young the future is a blank canvas, but looking back you are always able to see the big picture.” ~ Simon Pegg , Hindsight quotes foresight
- “Hindsight’s a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.” ~ Kate Atkinson
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“It’s only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.” ~ Maya Lin
- “Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.” ~ Tim O’Brien
- “In hindsight, I realized I could see into the future. Which is kind of like having premonitions of flashbacks.” ~ Steven Wright
- “It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight.” ~ Michael Burry
- “I once called the head of a network a liar. In hindsight, I should have called him an incompetent liar.” ~ Steven Levitan
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“Hindsight is the historian’s necessary vice.” ~ Hilary Mantel
- “How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field… Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.” ~ Tom Stoppard
- “I began demonstrating against serious culture. In hindsight, the actual course of events has been very humiliating for me, because no one picked up on the intellectual critique I made.” ~ Henry Flynt
- “It’s hard to see a river all at once, especially in the mountains. Down on the plains, rivers run in their course as straightforward as time, channeled toward the sea. But up in the headwaters, a river isn’t a point where you stand. In the beginnings of the river, you teeter on the edge of a hundred tiny watersheds where one drop of water is always tipping the balance from one stream to another. History changes with each tiny event, shaping an outcome that we can only fully grasp in hindsight. And that view changes as we move farther downstream.” ~ Lynn Culbreath Noel
- “People can do all kinds of things that maybe aren’t wise in hindsight because of jealousy.” ~ Kristin Bauer van Straten
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“I always enjoyed movies and in hindsight I realise how captivating they were to me.” ~ Adam Brody
- “For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.” ~ Eric Foner
- “In the financial markets, hindsight is forever 20/20, but foresight is legally blind. And thus, for most investors, market timing is a practical and emotional impossibility.” ~ Benjamin Graham
- “I write a lot about the past because I really see things clearly in hindsight.” ~ Skylar Grey
- “Frankly, to be honest, I hadn’t worked for two years before ‘Murphy Brown.’ It’s a nice illusion now to think of all of us as terribly successful and talented people at the top of our profession, but that’s hindsight. I had to pray for a job like this.” ~ Charles Kimbrough
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“Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second-guessing is not a strategy.” ~ George W. Bush
- “In hindsight, everything is much clearer.” ~ Bart Cummings
- “Hindsight is a wonderful thing but foresight is better, especially when it comes to saving life, or some pain!” ~ William Blake
- “With hindsight, it is always easy to blame everyone else.” ~ Jean-Claude Juncker
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“Hindsight. It’s like foresight without a future.” ~ Kevin Kline
- “Hindsight usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.” ~ Grace Paley
- “It has been a mistake living my life in the past. One cannot ride a horse backwards and still hold its reins.” ~ Richard Paul Evans
- “The inevitable effect of a biographer’s hindsight is to belittle the subject’s foresight.” ~ Clive James
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“And why do we worship hindsight (as in the news media’s constant rehash of the day, the week, the year) and yet distrust foresight, which actually might make a difference in our lives?” ~ Gavin de Becker
- “From the hindsight of history George Washington seems larger than life, more statuesque than man. Too bad! Washington’s greatness as a leader was courage under fire and persistence in the face of obstacles. Yet even he at times doubted himself. But he put those doubts aside and forged ahead, convinced of his noble purpose.” ~ John Baldoni
- “Hindsight is 20/20, but the moral of the writing for me is that when you’re feeling very scared and nervous about something and you’re fairly convinced that it could be a massive disaster, that’s exactly the idea that you should do.” ~ Damon Lindelof
Hindsight is the ability to understand, after something has happened, why or how it was done and how it might have been done better.
