Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.
In retrospect there were failures enough to go around. There were failures before the storm and failures after the storm.
The past in retrospect holds manifold disenchantments, failures and even tragedies; and yet the worse may be forgotten and the best held fast.
A lot of things in history are timing, and it's very peculiar because in retrospect things [and] people can look more brilliant or necessary than they actually were.
. . . stupidity is one of the two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.
We can see in retrospect that criminalizing the consumption of alcohol proves not to be the solution to the very real problem of drunkenness. So to what I want to say is the very real problem of the human susceptibility to addiction isn't best dealt with by building prisons and throwing people into jails.
I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.
Life is not only meant to be appreciated in retrospect. . . There is something each day to embrace and cherish.
There are many things we only see clearly in retrospect.
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.
It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
It is only in retrospect that the high points of our lives rise up, flaunting banners.
Asked at the hearing why she hadn't pressed the FBI more closely about what it knew, or didn't know, about domestic terrorist threats, Rice acted as though the question was an odd one: it wasn't her job. Well, in retrospect, it was and now certainly is.
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.
The prosecution of [Warren] Hastings, though he should escape at last, must have good effect. It will alarm the servants of the Company in India, that they may not always plunder with impunity, but that there may be a retrospect; and it will show them that even bribes of diamonds to the Crown may not secure them from prosecution.
Each person’s life is dominated by a central event, which shapes and distorts everything that comes after it and, in retrospect, everything that came before.
Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me.
People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.
I did all the stuff that people do - film, performance, photography, pictures and words, words and pictures. In retrospect, I was trying to find some way to put things - meaning images and forms - together that highlighted some idea of what was underneath the surface of an image, what determined how something was seen.