There is no stepping backward.

Love me little, love me long,
Is the burden of my song;
Love that is too hot and strong
Burneth soon to waste;
Still I would not have thee cold,
Not too backward or too bold;
Love that lasteth till 'tis old
Fadeth not in haste. [ Old Ballad ]

Whose yesterdays look backward with a smile. [ Young ]

Backward, turn backward, O Time In your flight!
Make me a child again, just for tonight! [ Elizabeth Akers Allen ]

Hope, folding her wings, looked backward, and became regret. [ Mrs. Marian Lewes Cross (pen name George Eliot) ]

Slow are the steps of freedom, but her feet turn never backward. [ Lowell ]

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. [ Burke ]

A genuine passion is like a mountain stream; it admits of no impediment; it cannot go backward; it must go forward. [ Bovee ]

On things which are no more to be changed a backward glance must be no longer cast! What is done is done, and so remains. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence. His name, like a shuttlecock, must be beat backward and forward, or it falls to the ground. [ Johnson ]

When I beheld human affairs involved in such dense darkness, the guilty exulting in their prosperity, and pious men suffering wrong, what religion I had began to reel backward and fall. [ Claudius, Claudian ]

We cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent; we cannot kill and not kill at the same moment; but a moment is room enough for the loyal and mean desire, for the outflash of a murderous thought, and the sharp backward stroke of repentance. [ George Eliot ]

It is necessary to look forward as well as backward, as some think it is always necessary to regulate their conduct by things that have been done of old times, but that past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on an alternative of some past that went before it. [ Madame De Stael ]