quotations about the future
Of the future, man knows least; yet, about this, he worries most.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
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 future was always more important than the past.
PAUL PARK
A Princess of Roumania
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
You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it.
FREDERIK POHL
"Science Fiction's Hidden Hero"
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
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
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
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
A wise man would ignore the future and drink and carouse while he still has an opportunity to enjoy this world.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Brisingr
Every second that passes is like a door that opens to allow in what has not yet happened, what we call the future, but, to challenge the contradictory nature of what we have just said, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the future is just an immense void, that the future is just the time on which the eternal present feeds.
JOSé SARAMAGO
The Double
You glorify the past
When the future dries up.
U2
"God Part II"
I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Mill on the Floss
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
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 future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.
DENNIS GABOR
Inventing the Future
Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.
ALVIN TOFFLER
Future Shock
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
Man is better without knowledge of things to come, for what is to be will be, and man can neither avert nor hasten. It is better to go in the dark when the road must pass a lion and there is no other road.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
Kull: Exile of Atlantis
The future is not google-able.
WILLIAM GIBSON
comments at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, Feb. 5, 2004