quotations about the future
People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
GEORGE ORWELL
Partisan Review, Winter 1945
It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
Science and the Modern World
We must discipline ourselves to convert dreams into plans, and plans into goals, and goals into those small daily activities that will lead us, one sure step at a time, toward a better future.
JIM ROHN
Five Major Pieces To the Life Puzzle
The best way to predict your future is to create it.
ROBERT ANTHONY
Think Big
Total self-confidence is built through positive expectations. You can build positive expectations by knowing that you have the power within to overcome any obstacle that lies ahead. So many people have a magnetic attraction to the past. They save momentos, clippings, old letters, and trivia. There is nothing wrong with this, but if you want to succeed, your mind must focus on where you are going, not on where you have been. Instead of saving momentos, clippings, old letters, and trivia from the past, it would be more productive to make a scrapbook with pictures of where you want to go and what you want to be in the future.
ROBERT ANTHONY
The Ultimate Secrets of Total Self-Confidence
Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.... You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
JOHN GREEN
Looking for Alaska
Perhaps the safest prediction we can make about the future is that it will surprise us.
GEORGE LEONARD
The Silent Pulse
We're not responsible for the world we're born into. Only for the world we leave when we die. So we have to accept what's gone before us in the past, and work to change the only thing we can--the future.
WILLIAM SHATNER
The Ashes of Eden
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
The future was a time that called into question everything that came before it.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's.
JEAN PAUL
Treasury of Thought
It is today that we must create the world of the future.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Tomorrow Is Now
The future will soon be a thing of the past.
GEORGE CARLIN
Napalm and Silly Putty
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
Whether we shape the future in the image of our hopes, is ours to determine by our actions and our choices.
RICHARD NIXON
Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1969
Coming events cast their shadows before.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
The greatest adventure is what lies ahead.
Today and tomorrow are yet to be said.
The chances, the changes are all yours to make.
The mold of your life is in your hands to break.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Hobbit
The present is the food of the future.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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
Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.
TRACY LETTS
August: Osage Country