Life can only be understood going backward, but must be lived going forward.

Life can only be understood backward; the trouble is, it has to be lived forward.

It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards.

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.

It was Kierkegaard who said that life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward.

Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forward.

It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

la vida sólo puede ser entendida mirando hacia atrás; aunque deba ser vivida mirando hacia adelante

What is our life: (Pause.) it’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment?

Mirrors reverse life, memories reverse time.

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want. MARGARET YOUNG

There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.