quotations about the future
A fortune-teller may inform you, having pocketed your two guineas, that a rich uncle in Australia is going to leave you a million pounds next year. She doesn't promise you the million pounds herself; obviously that is coming to you anyhow, fortune-teller or no fortune-teller. There is no suggestion on her part that she is arranging your future for you. All that she promises to do for two guineas is to give you a little advance information. She tells you that you are coming into a million pounds next year, and if you believe it, I should say that it was well worth the money. You have a year's happiness (if that sort of thing makes you happy), a year in which to tell yourself in every trouble, "Never mind, there's a good time coming"; a year in which to make glorious plans for the future, to build castles in the air, or (if your taste is not for castles) country cottages and Mayfair flats. And all this for two guineas; it is amazingly cheap.
A. A. MILNE
If I May
A wise man would ignore the future and drink and carouse while he still has an opportunity to enjoy this world.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Brisingr
The story of the future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same thing that shall be.
LORD ACTON
The History of Freedom in Christianity
One might as well attempt to calculate mathematically the contingent forms of the tinkling bits of glass in a kaleidoscope as to look through the tube of the future and foretell its pattern.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
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
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
EMIL CIORAN
History & Utopia
You glorify the past
When the future dries up.
U2
"God Part II"
The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.
HENRI BERGSON
Time and Free Will
Tomorrow may never come to us. We do not live in tomorrow. We cannot find it in any of our title-deeds. The man who owns whole blocks of real estate, and great ships on the sea, does not own a single minute of tomorrow. Tomorrow! It is a mysterious possibility, not yet born. It lies under the seal of midnight--behind the veil of glittering constellations.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it.
RAY BRADBURY
Beyond 1984: The People Machines
Well the future for me is already a thing of the past.
BOB DYLAN
"Bye and Bye"
A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
"My Future Plans,", The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein
The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Fresh Air, Aug. 31, 1993
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 the future, man knows least; yet, about this, he worries most.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Behind the curtain's mystic fold
The glowing future lies unrolled.
BRET HARTE
speech, Jan. 19, 1870
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
To know the future absolutely it to be trapped into that future absolutely. It collapses time. Present becomes future.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it.
FREDERIK POHL
"Science Fiction's Hidden Hero"
Don't tell me about the future. I've been all over the future. Spend half my time there. It's the same as anywhere else. Anywhen else. Whatever. Just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Mostly Harmless