Forward Ever Backward Never Quotes & Sayings

Life is always new, mind is always old. Life is never old, mind is never new. Hence they never meet, they can't meet. Mind moves backward, life moves forward. So those who try to live life through the mind are simply doing something so utterly stupid that the day they recognize what they have been doing to themselves, they will not be able to believe that they could have been so stupid, so ridiculous, so absurd. — Osho

But though we'll know forward and we've known backward, we will never know the present. This moment and the next one and even the one that would have been right now are gone, already passed, and all we're left with are these tired bodies, the only proof that we've lived through time and survived it. It'll be worth it, though, in the end. — Tahereh Mafi

When searching for help, look for the one that will push, not the one that will pull! Your machinery needs a pusher; just avoid every puller and you'll keep going forward! — Israelmore Ayivor

To count the stones losing count
is the sense of our life: the algebra
of our displacements.
To follow paths losing sense
is the circumvolution, the evolution: the logic
of our moments. But. No.
There is no symmetry in our acts.
Never the chance of steps that surprise us
to salt.
Our time machine. Forward.
Never backward the meat machine.
No turning back. No turning back.
There is no remedy: death
is an incurable asymmetry.
Huge is the ticking of the Clock but
but our time has the clutch, the vortex
the saltwater of a wave that covers us.
It reshapes and hollows out the face, like sand
robs us of our flesh. — Piero Olmeda

Seen from the outside, which it never is, the Restaurant resembles a giant glittering starfish beached on a forgotten rock. Each of its arms house the bars, the kitchens, the force-field generators which protect the entire structure and the decayed hunk of planet on which it sits, and the Time Turbines which slowly rock the whole affair backward and forward across the crucial moment. — Douglas Adams

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

you, and have no little girls' clothes to mend." "Yes," said Maggie. "It is with me as I used to think it would be with the poor uneasy white bear I saw at the show. I thought he must have got so stupid with the habit of turning backward and forward in that narrow space that he would keep doing it if they set him free. One gets a bad habit of being unhappy." "But I shall put you under a discipline of pleasure that will make you lose that bad habit," said Lucy, sticking the black butterfly absently in her own collar, while her eyes met Maggie's affectionately. "You dear, tiny thing," said Maggie, in one of her bursts of loving admiration, "you enjoy other people's happiness so much, I believe you would do without any of your own. I wish I were like you." "I've never been tried in that way," said Lucy. "I've always — George Eliot

Our Christian walk should never be stagnant. The crucial question for us is this: Which direction are we moving? Are we moving forward or are we moving backward? — Wendy Blight

Every achievement of man is a value in itself, but it is also a stepping-stone to greater achievements and values. Life is growth; not to move forward, is to fall backward; life remains life, only so long as it advances. Every step upward opens to man a wider range of action and achievement
and creates the need for that action and achievement. There is no final, permanent "plateau". The problem of survival is never "solved", once and for all, with no further thought or motion required. More precisely, the problem of survival is solved, by recognizing that survival demands constant growth and creativeness. — Ayn Rand

I am going to take you every imaginable way,' he promised on a whisper, tugging her bodice lower.
'Excellent,' she murmured. She tugged his shirt from his trousers.
'Right side up, upside down, sideways, sitting, standing. You on top. Then me on top.'
'A brilliant plan.' His shirt fell from his shoulders. Oh, his shoulders. The vast glorious curve of them. She couldn't wait to lick one.
'Backward, forward. On the bed, on the table, on the settee.'
He paused, and lifted her dress off over her head with all the ceremony of an unveiling. It fell to the floor.
'And then?' she whispered.
'And then we'll do it all over again.'
It was the never-ending story! — Julie Anne Long

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

The president, the secretary of state, the businessman, the preacher, the vendor, the spies, the clients and managers - all walking around Wall Street like chickens with their heads cut off - rushing to escape bankruptcy - plotting to melt down the Statue of Liberty - to press more copper pennies - to breed more headless chickens - to put more feathers in their caps - medals, diplomas, stock certificates, honorary doctorates - eggs and eggs of headless chickens - multitaskers - system hackers - who never know where they're heading
northward, backward, eastward, forward, and never homeward - (where is home) - home is in the head - (but the head is cut off) - and the nest is full of banking forms and Easter eggs with coins inside. Beheaded chickens, how do you breed chickens with their heads cut off? By teaching them how to bankrupt creativity. — Giannina Braschi

Notwithstanding how uncanny moments of life might be, you never walk backwards. Once you take a step, you move forward by a step with a step. That is life! Even a child would never crawl backward and so would streams hardly flow backward. Just keep moving when it is a must to move! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors. — Edmund Burke

The question is, are you going to grow or are you going to just stay as you are out of fear and waste your precious human life by status quo-ing instead of being willing to break the sound barrier? Break the glass ceiling, or whatever it is in your own life? Are you willing to go forward? I suggest finding the willingness to go forward instead of staying still, which is essentially going backward, particularly when you have a calling in some direction. That calling needs to be answered. And it's not necessarily going to work out the way you want it to work out, but it is taking you forward, and you are leaving the nest. And that never can be a mistake - to fly instead of staying in the nest with all the poop and everything that's in there. TS: — Pema Chodron

I often have said to people that there are really two cities in the country where the outlook is always forward-looking - there is never really a backward-looking tendency. My banking work has taken me out to Palo Alto, what is commonly called Silicon Valley. And you sense out there is always a forward-looking outlook. And New York City. — Harold Ford Jr.

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. — Liu Cixin

What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. On — Liu Cixin

I didn't understand her being gone, either. I had seen her fall. Now her part of any conversation would always be unsaid, and the direction she would have gone walking would always be empty. Her absence extended in lines of numbers made of smoke, backward in memory and forward in futures never to occur. — Gordon Dahlquist

He moved on down the alley, his feet walking forward and his brain swimming backward through a sea of time. It was a dark sea, much darker than the alley. The tide was slow and there were no waves, just tiny ripples that murmured very softly. Telling him about yesterday. Telling him that yesterday could never really be discarded, it was always a part of now. There was just no way to get rid of it. No way to push it aside or throw it into an ash can, or dig a hole and bury it. For all buried memories were nothing more than slow-motion boomerangs, taking their own sweet time to come back. This one had taken seven years. — David Goodis

But thought we'll know forward and we've known backward, we will never know the present. This moment and the next on and even the one that would've been right now are gone, already passed, and all we're left with are these tired bodies, the only proof that we've lived through time and survived it.
It'll be worth it, though, in the end.
Fighting for a lifetime of this. — Tahereh Mafi

XI
I sang his name instead of song;
Over and over I sang his name:
Backward and forward I sang it along,
With my sweetest notes, it was still the same!
I sang it low, that the slave-girls near
Might never guess, from what they could hear,
That all the song was a name. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning