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Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul M. Glaser

"We all know that looking back only gets you into an accident because you're going to run into something without seeing it"

About this Quote

Glaser’s line lands like a piece of streetwise coaching disguised as a traffic warning: keep staring in the rearview mirror and you’ll crash. It’s an actor’s metaphor, built to be instantly graspable, the kind that plays well in interviews and locker-room talk because it translates an inner problem (regret, fixation, second-guessing) into a physical consequence. That concreteness is the point. It doesn’t ask you to contemplate your feelings; it dares you to imagine the sickening jolt of impact.

The intent is motivational, but not in the syrupy “think positive” sense. It’s about attention as a finite resource. The subtext is almost accusatory: you already know this, you’ve been warned by experience, and you keep doing it anyway. “We all know” ropes the listener into a shared commonsense reality, making refusal harder. Glaser frames backward-looking not as nostalgia but as a hazard, implying that rumination isn’t merely unproductive, it’s dangerous - it steals perception from what’s directly ahead.

Context matters because the speaker is an actor, someone whose work is famously retrospective: scenes are shot, reshot, replayed, reviewed. Performers live with constant post-mortems - what worked, what didn’t, how they were seen. The quote reads like a self-defense mechanism against that professional trap, a reminder that craft can’t become captivity. It’s also a cultural nudge against our era’s obsessive replay function, where every mistake is archived and every past self is searchable. Glaser’s warning is blunt: memory is useful, but fixation is a collision course.

Quote Details

TopicLive in the Moment
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Glaser, Paul M. (2026, January 15). We all know that looking back only gets you into an accident because you're going to run into something without seeing it. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-all-know-that-looking-back-only-gets-you-into-157021/

Chicago Style
Glaser, Paul M. "We all know that looking back only gets you into an accident because you're going to run into something without seeing it." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-all-know-that-looking-back-only-gets-you-into-157021/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We all know that looking back only gets you into an accident because you're going to run into something without seeing it." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-all-know-that-looking-back-only-gets-you-into-157021/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Paul M. Glaser (born September 25, 1943) is a Actor from USA.

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