A Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Quote Topics

Backward Historian Looking Looking Back Prophet

Quote Author

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
German - Poet
March 10, 1772 - January 12, 1829

The impulse to scapegoat and belittle threatens to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking people. In the case of the Republican Party, those things also threaten to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking minority party.

Jeff Flake

A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.

Karl Kraus

If you are walking backward, away from something you think is a mistake, you may be right in supposing it is a mistake, but for you to be walking backward is never right. You know what happens to people who walk backward.... We are meant to walk forward, not backward, and reaction is always a matter of walking backward.

J. I. Packer

Looking forward to going home, I was necessarily looking backward.

Muriel Spark

You know, I try not to look back, because looking forward is so much better than looking backward.

Jim Bakker

In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that's happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.

Salman Rushdie

I consider myself a progressive. I have a passion for people who work. To me, this is about forward looking versus backward looking. Ideological gradations are the wrong way to look at it.

Rahm Emanuel

Remember, you must not sleep at the Seder. If you do, Elijah the Prophet will come with a bag on his shoulders. On the two first nights of Passover, Elijah the Prophet goes about looking for those who have fallen asleep at the Seder, and takes them away in his bag.

Sholom Aleichem

I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.

Charlotte Bronte

The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.

Herman Melville

You live life looking forward, you understand life looking backward.

Soren Kierkegaard

The prophet who misses it occasionally in his prophecies may be ignorant, immature, or presumptuous, or he may be ministering with too much zeal and too little wisdom and anointing. But this does not prove him a false prophet. It is certainly possible for a true prophet to be inaccurate.

Bill Hamon

"President Monson, I may never see the Prophet. I may never hear the Prophet. But President, far better, now that I am a member of this Church, I can obey the Prophet."