quotations about the future
Tomorrow will be a new day.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
We are all engaged in looting the past. (Only the greatest geniuses manage to steal from the future.)
DONALD BARTHELME
"The Emerging Figure"
The best is always yet to come.
BOB DYLAN
"If Dogs Run Free"
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
The future is an infinite succession of presents.
HOWARD ZINN
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
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 are the first men of a Future that has not materialized. We belong to a "great age" that has not "come off". We moved too quickly for the world. We set too sharp a pace.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Blasting and Bombardiering
You can never plan the future by the past.
EDMUND BURKE
letter to a Member of the National Assembly
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
AYN RAND
The Romantic Manifesto
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
Rational behavior ... depends upon a ceaseless flow of data from the environment. It depends upon the power of the individual to predict, with at least a fair success, the outcome of his own actions. To do this, he must be able to predict how the environment will respond to his acts. Sanity, itself, thus hinges on man's ability to predict his immediate, personal future on the basis of information fed him by the environment.
ALVIN TOFFLER
Future Shock
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
EUGENE O'NEILL
A Moon for the Misbegotten
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
The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
The best way to predict your future is to create it.
ROBERT ANTHONY
Think Big
There is no future until we settle our past.
ALEXA DAVALOS
The Chronicles of Riddick
It is impossible for you to take power over the future because it isn't even real.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
The Shack
What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Creation and P. H. Gosse," Other Inquisitions