When people laughed at him because he walked backward beneath the portico, he said to them: "Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?"
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Stobaeus, iii. 4. 83Diogenes of Sinope
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Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight!
Make me a child again, just for to-night!Elizabeth Chase Allen
Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years!
I am so weary of toil and of tears,—
Toil without recompense, tears all in vain!
Take them, and give me my childhood again!Elizabeth Chase Allen
There is a similar quote by Edmund Burke "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.", but the relationship between them is unclear.
George Santayana
In a culture where pessimism has metastasized like slow carcinoma, that crazy Irishman was backward enough to try to raise hopes, like hothouse flowers. In an era during which even judicious use of alcohol has been increasingly bad-rapped, the man who came to be known as The Mick of Time was backward enough to think that the world can look just that essential tad better when seen through a flask, brightly. (As long as you let someone else drive you home afterward.) Above all, he — and his goofball customers — believed that shared pain is lessened, and shared Joy increased.
Now he is gone. Gone back whence he came, and we are all the poorer for it. But I refuse to say that we will not see his like again. Or his love again.Spider Robinson
Thirty-one years ago, Dick Feynman told me about his "sum over histories" version of quantum mechanics. "The electron does anything it likes," he said. "It just goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes, and then you add up the amplitudes and it gives you the wave-function." I said to him, "You're crazy." But he wasn't.
Richard Feynman
Diogenes of Sinope
Dion, Stephane
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