quotations about the future
Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.
TRACY LETTS
August: Osage Country
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
It Seems to Me: Selected Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt
The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.
ANITA BROOKNER
Lewis Percy
The future is still unspoiled.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
A Long Fatal Love Chase
This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
attributed, The Peter Plan: A Proposal for Survival
We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Pattern Recognition
God, in His great and infinite widsom, never intended that we should see into futurity, for had He gifted us with the power, it would have led to numberless cases of self-destruction. Who, that has gone through trials and troubles without number, in his weary journey and pilgrimage through this world of trial and woe, had he seen these trials and troubles in the bright and sunny days of his youth, could have lived to face them? Not one in a hundred. What mother, when gazing over her first born infant with pride, rapture, and delight beaming through the windows of her soul, could have believed that that child of hers would one day shut the door on her; or that he would stagger home, a rogue, liar, and confirmed drunkard? What blushing bride, leaving the altar with the husband of her choice, the man who has sworn before God to protect her, would believe that that arm she is then leaning on to support a heart loaded with love and joy, would, ere long, disgrace the manhood of its owner, and fell her to the ground? For our present peace, let us all thank God we cannot gaze into the mysterious regions of the future.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
Short Essays
I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Bell Jar
Learn to recognize the future the way a Steersman identifies guiding stars and corrects the course of his vessel. Learn from the past; never use it as an anchor.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
The future is not an inheritance, it is an opportunity and an obligation.
BILL CLINTON
We are all engaged in looting the past. (Only the greatest geniuses manage to steal from the future.)
DONALD BARTHELME
"The Emerging Figure"
We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it.
BARACK OBAMA
speech to joint session of Congress, sep. 9, 2009
If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not;
Speak then to me.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Mabeth
It is not the present which unfluences the future, thou fool, but the future which forms the present. You have it all backward. Since the future is set, an unfolding of events which will assure that future is fixed and inevitable.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
The best is always yet to come.
BOB DYLAN
"If Dogs Run Free"
The best way to predict your future is to create it.
ROBERT ANTHONY
Think Big
The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.
BILL WATTERSON
Calvin and Hobbes
There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Zombie
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
EUGENE O'NEILL
A Moon for the Misbegotten
We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash