quotations about the future
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
The best way to predict your future is to create it.
ROBERT ANTHONY
Think Big
The future is not google-able.
WILLIAM GIBSON
comments at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, Feb. 5, 2004
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
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
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
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
We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it.
BARACK OBAMA
speech to joint session of Congress, sep. 9, 2009
The present is the food of the future.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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
It is today that we must create the world of the future.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Tomorrow Is Now
Perhaps the safest prediction we can make about the future is that it will surprise us.
GEORGE LEONARD
The Silent Pulse
You can't see the future, there's no such thing. It's all bets. You'll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn't mean either of them's wrong.
CHINA MIéVILLE
Kraken
The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
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
I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Bell Jar
Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Hyperion
The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.
ANITA BROOKNER
Lewis Percy
What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
The future is not an inheritance, it is an opportunity and an obligation.
BILL CLINTON