quotations about the future
It is not the present which unfluences the future, thou fool, but the future which forms the present. You have it all backward. Since the future is set, an unfolding of events which will assure that future is fixed and inevitable.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
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
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 ain't what it used to be.
YOGI BERRA
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
Coming events cast their shadows before.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
We are always looking into the future, but we see only the past.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles," The Writings of Madame Swetchine
Tomorrow gives a beck'ning hand--
I turn my face away;
I'll not invite her to my home--
I only love Today.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Today"
The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.
BILL WATTERSON
Calvin and Hobbes
The future? I hate it because I will not be there.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Learn to recognize the future the way a Steersman identifies guiding stars and corrects the course of his vessel. Learn from the past; never use it as an anchor.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
He only is anxious about the future, to whom the present is unprofitable.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
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
This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
attributed, The Peter Plan: A Proposal for Survival
There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Zombie
The future is still unspoiled.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
A Long Fatal Love Chase
The best is always yet to come.
BOB DYLAN
"If Dogs Run Free"
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