Backward Thinking Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy reading and share 37 famous quotes about Backward Thinking with everyone.
Top Backward Thinking Quotes

When you focus on lack and scarcity and what you don't have, you fuss about it with your family, you discuss it with your friends, you tell your children that you don't have enough - "We don't have enough for that, we can't afford that" - then you'll never be able to afford it, because you begin to attract more of what you don't have. If you want abundance, if you want prosperity, then focus on abundance. Focus on prosperity. (Lisa Nichols)
Many people in Western culture are striving for success. They want the great home, they want their business to work, they want all these outer things. But what we found in our research is that having these outer things does not necessarily guarantee what we really want, which is happiness. So we go for these outer things thinking they're going to bring us happiness , but it's backward. You need to go for the inner joy, the inner peace, the inner vision first, and then all of the outer things appear. (Marci Shimoff)
— Rhonda Byrne

Isaiah 55 provides an entirely different framework for thinking about God's justice, because it suggests that we have it backward - the mystery lies not in God's unfathomable wrath but in his unfathomable mercy. God's ways are higher than our ways because his capacity to love is infinitely greater than our own. Despite all that we do to alienate ourselves from God, all that we do to insult and disobey, God abundantly pardons again and again. — Rachel Held Evans

The mainstream perception that conservatives are close-minded and dogmatic while liberals are open-minded and free-thinking has it almost exactly backward. Liberal dogma is settled: The government should do good, where it can, whenever it can. That is President Obama's idea of pragmatism and bipartisanship: He's open to all ideas, from either side of the aisle, about how best to expand government and get the state more involved in our lives. — Jonah Goldberg

I think for kids it's the most important part of the game. You have to be able to skate forward and backward, stop and start, go from side to side. Those are the basics of the game. — Bobby Hull

One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters. — W. H. Auden

I sprinted
past the onlookers without a backward glance, taking the stairs two at a time. I shut myself off to
Lissa's feelings as I walked down her hall. It seemed silly, but I wanted to be surprised. I just wanted
to open my eyes and see her in person, with no warnings as to how she was feeling or what she was
thinking. — Richelle Mead

Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start with an end product in mind, and reason your way backward to the raw wood. — Joshua Foer

Can anything good come of a backward way of thinking like judging someone based on skin color? No way. — Adam McKay

No one likes to be criticized, of course, but if the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell we were thinking. — Daniel Gilbert

This is because the Greeks had it backward, and no matter how hard humans try thinking otherwise, they still think like Greeks. For the Greeks, when you looked ahead all you saw was the past. It was like the past was the future. — Kathryn Davis

The only places where I have found that simple human dignity, that respect for the other man, and the gracious feel of tolerance and humanity have not been either among the heroes of the class-struggle or the 'thinking men' but among my simple 'backward' people. — Peter Abrahams

I finally understood that I didn't lack pen and paper but my own
memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called
rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,
a great human gift disowned. — Grace Paley

We don't spend our days thinking about Microsoft or trying to get revenge on Microsoft. That's a really negative and backward way, and that's not how I want to live. — Mitchell Baker

Thinking
Thinking is passing from the false to the true
and seeing the Absolute Whole in the part.
When the idea enters the mind,
it is a reminiscence of a former state,
and passes on to interpretation.
. . . He who sees by illumination
discerns God first in everything.
But he who sees by logic only,
and seeks to prove the necessary,
is bewildered and sometimes travels
backward in a circle, or is imprisoned
in a chain of proofs.
Fool! He seeks the dazzling sun
by the dim light of a candle in the desert. — Mahmud Shabistari

I believe that we're all created in the image of God and we're all fallen sinners. And I think we can recognize that as we look backward in history. — Russell D. Moore

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

What is it?" She hissed through clenched teeth. "What's wrong?"
He bent down toward her. "I was just thinking how beautiful you looked."
The punch was impressive, both accurate and strong. Jette's fist caught her husband squarely on the jaw. It was an absolute peach of a shot, and it propelled him backward into the chest of drawers. — Alex George

The streak of bleach in my hair is as obvious as ever. Am I really going out in public like this? I push my hair backward and forward a few times - but I can't hide it. Maybe I could walk along with my hand carelessly positioned at my head, as if I'm thinking hard. I attempt a few casual, pensive poses in the mirror.
"Is your head all right?"
I swivel round in shock to see Nathaniel at the open door, wearing a plaid shirt and jeans.
"Er ... fine," I say, my hand still glued to my head. "I was just ... "
Oh, there's no point. I bring my hand down from my hair and Nathaniel regards the streak for a moment.
"It looks nice," he says. "Like a badger."
"A badger?" I say, affronted. "I don't look like a badger."
"Badgers are beautiful creatures," says Nathaniel with a shrug. "I'd rather look like a badger than a stoat. — Sophie Kinsella

A good soldier, whether he leads a platoon or an army, is expected to look backward as well as forward; but he must think only forward. — Douglas MacArthur

Just think about this: haven't we been going just to and fro? The whole world rather. Years back, it was good to take vitamin supplements and today they are considered hampering body's natural immune. Sometime back, people were desperate to land up in high paying jobs, today there is a big entrepreneurship fad. Back in years, it was a pride to be settled in the city, now people are giving up all responsibilities to settle at a peaceful country side.
What are we all really doing? We are moving from pillar to post, forward and backward on theories. We are all as confused as the next person. And unfortunately, we are all going to leave this world with barely being able to decipher much. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Most people who want to get ahead do it backward. They think, 'I'll get a bigger job, then I'll learn how to be a leader.' But showing leadership skill is how you get the bigger job in the first place. Leadership isn't a position, it's a process. — John C. Maxwell

Bitterness is one of the deadliest emotions we ever feel. You can't look forward when you're bitter, only backward - thinking about what you've lost, stuck in the past, despairing because it's gone. In the end, it devours all hope. — Lynn Austin

I literally had a very articulate, though highly impaired, homeless man say to me, "Smokey! I love you! What's happening with Jacob?" Here's a guy living on the street, but he finds a way to watch Lost! And I'm looking at him, thinking, Your priorities are completely ass-backward! — Titus Welliver

He will talk to me a little while, too shy to tell me why he has come, and then he will thank me and leave, walking backward a few steps, thinking, Yes, the barn is still there, yes, the lilacs, even the pot of petunias. This was my father's house. And I will think, He is young. He cannot know that my whole like has come down to this moment.
That he has answered his father's prayers. — Marilynne Robinson

We know there are states, like Alaska, where there are not a lot of providers. How do we work on issues like that? How do we work on making sure that the small-business part of this works better? ... And if people have [alternate] plans, let's compare them and see. Access, affordability, and quality - that's what this is about. [But] "repeal" is a symbol of something that I don't think is connected to the substance of what's happening. Do you want to take away care from people who have preexisting conditions? [Repeal] takes you backward. — Sylvia Mathews Burwell

One of the pillars of backward thinking in America is the idea that you can have jobs or you can have clean air and water, but you can't have both. That myth has been busted a thousand times, but still it lives on. — Jeff Goodell

Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause - that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take the stance - backward. — Soren Kierkegaard

My dad says stop thinking that way. "You be lookin' backward all the time, Brady, you're gonna have one heck of a crook in the neck." He smiles when he says that. But I know what he means deep down, and it's not funny. You can't keep dwelling on the past when you can't undo it. You can't make it happen any different than it did. — Priscilla Cummings

My father prided himself on maintaining traditions that were hundreds of years old. You'll feel as if you've stepped back into the eighteenth century."
Her brows lifted in surprise. He could see the wheels turning in her clever brain, but she chose merely to nod, and perversely, though he knew he would not like it, he wanted to know what she was thinking. "Go on. Say it."
"It is nothing. Only - you are very much a man of the nineteenth century."
"You mean you're not surprised I left such a backward place."
"Such a backward place must be crying out for a man like you." Ainsley pushed her windswept hair out of her eyes. — Marguerite Kaye

Don't think you can attain total awareness and whole enlightenment without proper discipline and practice. This is egomania. Appropriate rituals channel your emotions and life energy toward the light. Without the discipline to practice them, you will tumble constantly backward into darkness. — Laozi

Don't step backward toward nothing, step forward toward something, better awkward steps forward, than coward steps backward. — Victoria Addino

I think there are white alumni out there who wouldn't mind having an African American president of their school, but would be reluctant to have an African American coach, because he represents the school so. I think it's just sheer backward racism. — Frank Deford

Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion. Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers. Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history. — P. J. O'Rourke

There is a danger, when thinking of the earliest civilized people, of putting too much emphasis on technology. One tends to assume that if you don't have, at least, a lavatory and perhaps something that will take you a lot faster than your own feet, or a certain number of gadgets in the house, then you must be in some way, a bit backward and defective ... the important thing to remember is that technology is not necessarily the same thing as civilization. — Jacquetta Hawkes

Over a billion people believe in Allah without truly knowing what Allah supposedly stands for or what he really demands of them. And the minority that do understand continue to be Moslems because they have redefined their morality and ethics to fit within the teachings of Islam, which are floridly lacking in morality. They therefore redefine what is good and evil in order to fit their lives into what is preached by Islam, instead of examining Islam to see if it fits within the good life. Backwards thinking, imposed by a backward religion. — Bertrand Russell

My being consists of matter and form, that is, of soul and body; annihilation will reach neither of them, for they were never produced out of nothing. The consequence is, that every part of me will serve to make something in the world; and this again will change into another part through an infinite succession of change. This constant method of alteration gave me my being, and my father before me, and so on to eternity backward: for I think I may speak thus, even though the world be confined within certain determinate periods. — Marcus Aurelius

We've got to turn this backward thinking around where ignorance is championed over intelligence. Young black kids being ridiculed by their peers for getting A's and speaking proper English: that's criminal. — Spike Lee