quotations about the future
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
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
EMIL CIORAN
History & Utopia
There is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
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
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
Behind the curtain's mystic fold
The glowing future lies unrolled.
BRET HARTE
speech, Jan. 19, 1870
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 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
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
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
I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Mill on the Floss
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
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
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
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