| | |

Future quotes

edits filters view all 75 quotes

“And there is nothing like dreams for engendering the future.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“We gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.” Edgar Allan Poe, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt

“So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. 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, London Letter

“The laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the future.” Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it’s too late.” Stephen King, 11/22/63

“The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?” Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The future isn't set in stone. Things change.” Stephenie Meyer, Twilight

“The question of armaments, whether on land or sea, is the most immediately and intensely practical question connected with the future fortunes of nations and of mankind.” Woodrow Wilson, A World League For Peace

“Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of...” Barack Obama, Inaugural Address

“The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“The past was like a bad dream; the future was all happy holiday as I moved southwards week by week, easily, lazily, lingering as long as I dared, but always heeding the call!” Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Who controls the past . . . controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, 1984

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” George Orwell, 1984

“We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.” George Orwell, 1984

“He doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there’s the future. Sheer vertigo.” Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

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

“It would seem, Adeimantus, that the direction in which education starts a man, will determine his future life.” Plato, The Republic

“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

“If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear Your favours nor your hate.” William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“I like men who have a future and women who have a past” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results.” Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher

“The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.” James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.” Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.” James Joyce, Ulysses

“We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.” Henry Kissinger, White House Years

“A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“this cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age.” G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.” Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“I don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in the present.” Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“The increase of disorder or entropy with time is one example of what is called an arrow of time, something that distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.” Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is” C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Economy is the method by which we prepare to-day to afford the improvements of to-morrow.” Calvin Coolidge, State of the Union Address

“Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter's place. When you handle the master carpenter's tools, chances are that you'll cut your hand.” Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.” C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies.” Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

“The visions we offer our children shape the future.” Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

“The future is just wasted on some people.” Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“She could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“The future is there . . . looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.” William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.” Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The only immediate utility of all sciences, is to teach us, how to control and regulate future events by their causes.” David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“He didn’t know what he was going to — but it had to be better than what he was leaving behind.” J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

“FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.” Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

“If we are all alive ten years hence, let's meet, and see how many of us have got our wishes, or how much nearer we are then than now” Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.” Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

view all 75 quotes

Related topics

past life present dream time control fate hope science change boredom children consequences ideals politics tyranny death man oppression freedom

Related authors

George Orwell (4)
John Green (2)
Edgar Allan Poe (2)
Chuck Palahniuk (5)
Oscar Wilde (3)
Paulo Coelho (3)
J. K. Rowling (3)
Stephen Hawking (3)
G. K. Chesterton (3)
James Joyce (2)
C. S. Lewis (2)
Edith Wharton (2)
Victor Hugo (1)
William Shakespeare (1)
Confucius (1)
Stephen King (1)
Milan Kundera (1)
Lao Tzu (1)
Carl Sagan (1)
J. R. R. Tolkien (1)

Related sources

The Picture of Dorian Gray (2)
Invisible Monsters (4)
The Alchemist (3)
A Brief History of Time (3)
State of the Union Address (3)
What's Wrong with the World (3)
1984 (3)
The Age of Innocence (2)
The Screwtape Letters (2)
London Letter (1)
Les Misérables (1)
Little Women (1)
Jane Eyre (1)
The Devil's Dictionary (1)
Tao Te Ching (1)
Analects (1)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1)
Pensées (1)
11/22/63 (1)
The Republic (1)

Links

Past quotes about future