Great Throughts Treasury

"The business of life is to go forward; he who sees evil in prospect meets it in his way, and he who catches it by retrospection turns back to find it. That which is feared may sometimes be avoided, but that which is regretted to-day may be regretted again to-morrow." -

"What must be done in thinking of life is to be served by a philosophizing that discovers truth by retrospection and by anticipation." - Karl Jaspers, fully Karl Theodor Jaspers

"Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself." - Karl Wilheim Friedrich Schlegel, later Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel

"We will not anticipate the past so mind, young people, our retrospection will be all to the future." - Richard Brinsley Sheridan

"The business of life, summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson