Top 76 Retrospective Quotes & Sayings

I think retrospective viewing of diving is nearly more important than some of the technology they are on about bringing in. If you do that and players get banned, it wouldn't take long before you'd cut it out.

I don't really think about having a retrospective on my high-school years. It's not something that, from a positive or a negative standpoint, is a driving force in my life.

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.

There's something to be said about being able to be retrospective about a certain age as opposed to just in it.

In 2011, 'Yourself in the World,' a book of my writings and interviews, was published in conjunction with a retrospective of my work at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Retrospective analysis is not a useful guide to current problems.

I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective.

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.

It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn't seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher.

What the NSA really wants is the capability of retrospective investigation. They want to have a perfect record of the last five years of your life, so when you come to their attention, they can know everything about you. I'm not down with that, but [Bill] Binney was trying to create something like that.

Love and death are very similar. They're the times in your life when you most want to believe in magic, when you yearn for some symbolic act or retrospective edit that can change the world you find yourself in.

As an historical novelist - there are few jobs more retrospective. I dumped science at an early age.

I was 15 years old at university, studying economics and philosophy, and I saw a retrospective of Australian film. They were very raw. 'Picnic at Hanging Rock,' 'Gallipoli;' they were fantastic.

When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.

When I put my big retrospective together in '96 [for the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York], I saw that there were all these pictures of people inside looking out. All these pictures of women in water and mirrors. I don't know what it means.

I think the reason why I never wanted to do a retrospective is because I was scared to go back and look at all this stuff through the years.

To me, photography is 90% a retrospective experience. There's the part of pursuing the image, and exposing the film, but once you make the exposure, you're always looking backwards in time. I like that aspect of photography.

I was very young, and I was on vacation with my family, and there was a retrospective of old films, and one of them was 'The Phantom of the Opera' with Claude Rains that was in color. It was something very important for my career because I began to follow these stories that were morbid.

Everyone knows that Theodore Roosevelt was able to wring so much life out of each day, every hour, every minute. And yet, when one is immersed in a detailed, retrospective review of his life, his intense living, his vigor di vita, is nonetheless breathtaking.

I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence.

My business is retrospective = I'm looking at the past, they all passed away - and it's a big pleasure, that's the point of collecting. It's certainly a [better] quality of life you have living with [these] works, but [I] also [value] the relationship we have with the artists.

You pick up very well-known books on Lincoln [and] you will find almost no reference to his long-term belief in colonization. Why? Because it doesn't fit the image of the Great Emancipator. It doesn't fit the retrospective view we want to have of Lincoln as the man who was the moralist in politics, who came into office committed to ending slavery and waited to sign this document.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

The retrospective glance is a relatively easy gesture for us to make.

I thought it would be my one and only exhibition so I decided to call it My Major Retrospective.

Normally, you should be dead if you have a retrospective.

Keep a record of every picture you paint, have them photographed and write down where they went. Some day, when one reaches a great age, there will be calls for a Retrospective Exhibition of a life's work.

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

Having a memoir and a retrospective of your work running almost simultaneously when you're still alive does feel a bit posthumous.

I felt most beautiful on the red carpet in Givenchy's sheer lace dress at a dinner hosted by Givenchy in honor of Marina Abramovich at the closing of her Museum of Modern Art retrospective, 'The Artist is Present', in 2010. It was the first time I had been dressed for an event, and everybody just fell in love with the dress.

In politics, as in womanizing, failure is decisive. It sheds its retrospective gloom on earlier endeavor which at the time seemed full of promise.

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

F For Fake is a talentless concoction of unparalleled ineptitude... It would have been a more generous gesture to show a retrospective of old Welles films rather than remind everyone of how low his ability as a filmmaker has plummeted.

A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.

In my head, my business is architecture and furniture; it's 70 percent Prouvé, and Corbusier, Royer, Jeanneret - they all passed away. So it's retrospective, I'm looking back.

I felt most beautiful on the red carpet in Givenchys sheer lace dress at a dinner hosted by Givenchy in honor of Marina Abramovich at the closing of her Museum of Modern Art retrospective, The Artist is Present, in 2010. It was the first time I had been dressed for an event, and everybody just fell in love with the dress.

But after this natural burst of indignation, no man of sense, courage, or prudence will waste his time or his strength in retrospective reproaches or repinings.

The Anthropocene essentially would be the time of human influence on the planet. That's controversial though, because geology is a retrospective discipline. The rocks of the Anthropocene haven't been deposited yet, really.

I've had people ask me to come and work for them. I went to Vienna and did three scenes in a movie for a guy that I met at a retrospective of Cassavetes films. It's a great way to travel, to meet people, to see different countries and cultures.

At a certain time, an artist needs a big retrospective. At other times, they need a more focused exhibition. It's a different story each time; it's about establishing a dialogue.

This is the trouble with cheating: there are no acceptable rules, or laws. It could be a smile, or dancing to a song that you considered to be indefinably 'ours'. It can feel like cheating to go to a restaurant that you used to go to with someone else. Keeping photographs of exes can infuriate, like retrospective cheating.

I had thrown my body in for art... I had thrown myself into this game for art. You know, I was not a very good artist. But this was, like, one thing I could do. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)

Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process data (but only data -- i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion.

As an historical novelist - there are few jobs more retrospective.

The 'Colours Of My Life' album is literally a 50-year retrospective.

I thought it would be my one and only exhibition, so I decided to call it My Major Retrospective.

The failure of the United Nations - My failure is maybe, in retrospective, that I was not enough aggressive with the members of the Security Council.

I've been asked to do a retrospective since I was about 28 and I always thought that was a bit odd. It's great to look forward as an artist because in the future the possibilities are infinite; you look back and it's all fixed so it's a scary thing.

I feel some allegiance to pushing electric-guitar music into a different realm, somewhere that isn't retrospective. There's a lot of guitar bands that are a tribute to the 1970s or the Nineties. I want to experiment with guitar music more.

It is a simple but sometimes forgotten truth that the greatest enemy to present joy and high hopes is the cultivation of retrospective bitterness.

People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing.

The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs.

I don't want to sound like a retrospective person stuck in the past, but the fact remains that, in my day, everything was in the hands of the driver - the gear changes, the delicate art of clutch control during race starts, managing engine revs during gear changes - everything.

I went to the big Picasso retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, and I think I went to an Andy Warhol retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, too. My mother was very good at taking me to things like that. We lived in Reading, but we went on these cultural trips to London.

The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity.

I don't know if this is the kind of retrospective analysis that people are fond of applying to their work or actions, but it feels like I knew I was going to be famous and I knew that an element of that would be traumatic, so that if I could make myself something big and otherworldly, it would be a kind of defence.

Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.

Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written... I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place.