Future tense

“ The future is in our hands now,—pliant and impressible as wax, and we are moulding it into form day by day. Will that form shed a cheering beam on our path, or will it cast around us a web of despondency? ”

“ They were constantly feeling the breath of the future pass in their long hair, and thrill through their long beards. They looked for the man of the future, the society of the future, the science of the future, the art of the future, the religion of the future. ”

“ When she thought of herself she was at once both eager and fearful to learn what the Future would be: as if there is not always still another Future—when one Future has become a Past—to fear and yet rush into! ”

“ The present moment is illuminated and made significant, is controlled and dominated, by experience of the past and by expectation of the future. Without any idea of the future our existence would be purely mechanical and meaningless: with too little eye to the future—a mere living from hand to mouth—it becomes monotonous and dull. ”

“ We think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress, development,—those are modern words. The modern idea is to leave the past and press onward to something new. ”

“ Not to the present is our hour confined,
The great and shadowy future is assigned
To be the glorious empire of the mind.
The past was once the future, and it wrought
In the high presence of on-looking thought;
All that we have, was by its efforts brought.
To-day creates to-morrow, and the tree
Of good or ill grows in past hours, what we
Make for the future—certain is to be. ”

“ It is, therefore, I believe, much more common for the solitary and thoughtful to amuse themselves with schemes of the future, than reviews of the past. For the future is pliant and ductile, and will be easily moulded by a strong fancy into any form. ”

“ For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. ”

“ The point from which you project yourself into the future appears to you to be the present, the now, but this is mistaken. There is only the past in operation and that movement creates the illusion of present and future. ”

“ The future is like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding all objects from our view: the past is alive and stirring with objects, bright or solemn, and of unfading interest. What is it in fact that we recur to oftenest? What subjects do we think or talk of? Not the ignorant future, but the well-stored past. ”

“ It is only the brush moving over the blank sheet of the future and tracing the indelible panorama of the past.
But of greatest import to us now is the dim blank filed of the Future. Swiftly and steadily is the unstained page being filled in: thought, word, and act, are being stamped there for ever as the ponderous cylinder of time revolves. It is vain to attempt to pierce its hazy veil,—it is futile to endeavour to read what has not yet been written: but we may, and we ought, to picture to ourselves that future bright and happy as we would wish it to be.—The past is gone from us—unalterable. ”

“ What is really momentous and all-important with us is the present, by which the future is shaped and colored. ”

“ Thou mental, moral orb—thou New, indeed new, Spiritual World!
The Present holds thee not—for such vast growth as thine,
For such unparallel'd flight as thine, such brood as thine,
The Future only holds thee and can hold thee. ”

“ What though the world has wonderfully advanced, there is not for me, for one—and I voice many another—aught in the present, or aught that imagination conjures up as the possible future, that can charm as does the sweet calling back of days gone by. ”

“ I own that the future, to which we are often referred for the “stuff that dreams are made of,” is more difficult for the fancy than the past, that the airy amplitude of its possibilities is somewhat chilly, and that we naturally long for the snug quarters of old, made warm by many generations of life. ”

“ It will to me unfold. [Pg 32]
“O man why seekest thou to know
The future, or the past?
The present is enough for you,
If not with clouds o’er cast.”
The mountains seemed to pity me,
The clouds shed showers of tears,
The sun looked down in reverence,
And said: “Allay your fears,”
“For there’s a power that rules mankind,
E’er has and ever will.
The future, and the past, are His,
Are governed by His will.” ”

“ Past, present, and future—all are divine—all are parts of a celestial scheme—none to be scorned, all to be loved and improved. But the past is under the sod; the future is behind the clouds; the present alone has its foot upon the green sward. ”

“ Great and holy thoughts of the Future,—shadowy, yet bold conceptions of the Infinite,—float past you dimly, and your hold is never strong enough to grapple them to you. They fly, like eagles, too near the sun ”

“ But just so the future, not, indeed, when viewed as to its unknown details, but when conceived as the region into which the present is passing away, when regarded as containing the goal of all our hopes, and the decision of all our cherished interests and destinies, — is not this future so bound up in one world of Being with the present, that, if we could indeed abstract from future Being, present Being would again lose not only all of its practical interest, but also a large part of its theoretical meaning? ”

“ What a mistake this life would be, what a wild feverish dream, what an unfinished and imperfect story, if it were not a prelude to something better! Taken by itself, it is all trouble and confusion; but taking the future as the keynote of the present, how wondrously harmonious the whole becomes! ”

“ And yet some germs of the future must be enfolded even in the present moment. The course of wisdom is to seek them neither in the old romance nor in the new rationalism, but in the subtle and ever-changing spirit of the times. ”

“ And, naturally enough, the future joins the past in this supersensuous world. He can hope, he can imagine, he can prophesy. And again the images of his hope are real; he sees them with that mind's eye which as yet he has not distinguished from his bodily eye. ”

“ The serious danger is that, with the impression of a long future before you, you should merely drift in the present, and forget how inextricably the texture of to-day will be woven into the fabric of to-morrow. ”

“ And as surely as every future grows out of past and present, so will the physiology of the future gradually extend the realm of matter and law until it is co-extensive with knowledge, with feeling, and with action.
The consciousness of this great truth weighs like a nightmare, I believe, upon many of the best minds of these days. They watch what they conceive to be the progress of materialism, in such fear and powerless anger as a savage feels, when, during an eclipse, the great shadow creeps over the face of the sun. ”

“ Gradually he spoke of himself, his aspirations, his plans for the future with its seemingly infinite possibilities all gone now. “There is no use in longer deceiving myself. My future in this world lies in the past.” ”

“ All is still And voiceless in the past! A veil is drawn Across the future! by life's mystic rill We sit and ponder, watching for the dawn Of some yet unconceived, far-reaching thought, By which our nature's secret shall be taught! ”

“ But you mortals are never satisfied."
"No; for I confess that this knowledge of the past and the present inspires me with a terrible desire to know the future."
"There are always two futures," said the mask; "there is the future of weak minds, and the future of strong minds. God has given man free will that he might choose. Your future depends on yourself." ”

“ The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past, troubled me, and I longed to have a future—a future with hope in it. ”

“ And now, at last, we have reached a point, where, in thinking of the future and the hope for coming generations, we may turn our gaze in a new direction and enter the realm of conjecture and prophecy. ”

“ Almost, one can fancy them sighing over the glories of the past, the degeneracy of the present, and the uncertain future of the presumptuous young upstart so serenely sitting on the ruins of its betters. ”

“ Your future is the not yet temporally expressed region wherein you, as finite being, seek your own further expression. That future is still, in one aspect, as we shall see, causally undetermined, precisely in so far as therein something unique, that is yours and yours only, is to appear in the form of various individually designed expressions of your life-purpose, — various individual deeds. ”

“ When the different particulars of a scene in which a man has been engaged, of a battle, for example, in which he has commanded, pass through his mind, there is a succession of ideas. In all these cases of the successions of sensations, or ideas, there is always one present, others past, and others to come, that is, future. Drop the connotation of “something past,” “something present,” “something future.” You have pastness, presentness, and futureness. But pastness, presentness, and futureness, are TIME. TIME can neither be shewn, nor conceived, to be any thing else. ”

“ There are moments when the human being sees the future in such lurid colours that he shrinks from fixing his mental eye upon it, puts a check upon all his intellectual activity, and tries to feel convinced that the future will never be, and that the past has never been. ”

“ All but at this present that future is, in which nature, who disposeth all things in order, will transform whatsoever thou now seest, fashioning from its substance somewhat else, and therefrom somewhat else in its turn, lest the world grow old. We are such stuff as dreams are made of—disturbing dreams. Awake, then! and see thy dream as it is, in comparison with that erewhile it seemed to thee. ”

“ Why, at the very height of desire and human pleasure,—worldly, social, amorous, ambitious, or even avaricious,—does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a doubt of what is—a retrospect to the past, leading to a prognostication of the future? ”

“ Perhaps we are at the top of the tree of development, and for them may be the future, for us the annihilation. Who knows? There, fly away, and make the most of the present, for nothing else is certain. ”

“ The future, were it the next moment, were it an object nearest and dearest to our hearts, is a dull blank, opaque, impervious to sense as an object close to the eye of the blind, did not the ray of reason and reflection enlighten it. ”

“ I cannot but believe that the poetry of the future, being more deeply instructed, will insist less emphatically upon human failure and less savagely upon the revolt of man. I anticipate in the general tone of it an earnestness, a fullness of tribute to the noble passion of life, an utterance simple and direct. I believe that it will take as its theme the magnificence of the spectacle of Man’s successful fight with Nature, not the grotesque and squalid picturesqueness of his occasional defeat. ”

“ If all these ideals have been realized, is it not a promise, or a prophecy, that our ideals of to-day, will be realized in the future? And if from the constitution of the human mind we could presage the ideals of the future, we could in a general way predict what the civilization of distant ages will develop. ”

“ It is difficult for anyone to foresee the Future— that word of wonderful depth which is the most awesome in the English language—into which men may cast the biggest venturings of experiment in the world; and generations watch them rise and flourish if they be right, or flounder and go under if they be wrong. ”

“ "what necessity is there to dwell on the Past, when the Present is so much surer—the Future so much brighter?" ”

“ These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. ”

“ The visible spectacle of the world with its implied "eternal arbiters" would be transmuted and transfigured by such an upheaval. For as long as the human will, as we know it now, remains in association with the aesthetic sense as we know it now, the creation of the future—however yielding and indetermined—must depend upon the form, the shape, the principle, the prophecy, the premonition, existing from the beginning in the nature of things. ”

“ It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. ”

“ We despair of the future, for one reason, because we attribute to the future our own growing sense of fatigue, the feelings of evening. But the future will, for those to whom it belongs, be morning, with the vigour and buoyancy of the awakening. ”

“ Moreover, we must look upon what is to occur as having already occurred, and see nothing but the present in the future, for the future is but the present a little farther on." ”