FUTURE QUOTES III

quotations about the future

Behind the curtain's mystic fold
The glowing future lies unrolled.

BRET HARTE

speech, Jan. 19, 1870


You should never fast-forward into the future. Because every time you do, you rob yourself of the journey, the present moment, which, in the end, is all there really is.

ALYSON NOËL

Blue Moon


You don't need to predict the future. Just choose a future -- a good future, a useful future -- and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.

ISAAC ASIMOV

Prelude to Foundation


What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

EMIL CIORAN

History & Utopia


The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.

DENNIS GABOR

Inventing the Future


The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

Letters and Papers from Prison


To know the future absolutely it to be trapped into that future absolutely. It collapses time. Present becomes future.

FRANK HERBERT

Children of Dune


The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.

DAN SIMMONS

The Rise of Endymion


Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

WINSTON CHURCHILL

speech in the House of Commons, Jun. 18, 1940


When then things to come are said to be seen, it is not themselves which as yet are not (that is, which are to be), but their causes perchance or signs are seen, which already are.

ST. AUGUSTINE

Confessions


The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.

ECKHART TOLLE

The Power of Now


I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.

GEORGE ELIOT

The Mill on the Floss


Welcome to the future.... All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.

IAIN M. BANKS

Matter


Our eyes are always blind when they view the future.

KELLY LINK

Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories


The future is not google-able.

WILLIAM GIBSON

comments at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, Feb. 5, 2004


Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.

ALVIN TOFFLER

Future Shock


The golden age is not in the past, but in the future; not in the origin of human experience, but in its consummate flower; not opening in Eden, but out from Gethsemane.

E. H. CHAPIN

Living Words


My visions of the future are always pretty much standard issue. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer ... and there are flying cars.

JOSS WHEDON

foreword, Fray


To ordain the future in advance in this way, man must first have learned to distinguish necessary events from chance ones, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it, and in general be able to calculate and compute.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Genealogy of Morals


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