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past quotes about future

English (28)

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“Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion
“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.” James Joyce, Ulysses
“things Past have a being in the Memory onely, but things To Come have no being at all; the Future being but a fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions Past, to the actions that are Present” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
“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
“Don't think of what's past! . . . I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what to-morrow has in store?” Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles
“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
“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.” Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
“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
“I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.” George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
“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
“Who controls the past . . . controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, 1984
“I don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in the present.” Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“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
“The laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the future.” Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
“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
“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 reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.” Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
“Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées
“I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past.” G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World
“I stole their future from them; I can only begin to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.” Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
“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
“The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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
“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
“I like men who have a future and women who have a past” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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
“And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.” G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

Related topics

future present memory time life death control regret ideals moving on knowledge happiness women learning books living sadness history change self

Related authors

William Shakespeare (7)
Oscar Wilde (5)
George Orwell (4)
James Joyce (4)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (3)
Chuck Palahniuk (3)
George Eliot (2)
Haruki Murakami (2)
Charles Dickens (2)
G. K. Chesterton (2)
Margaret Atwood (2)
Isaac Asimov (2)
Stephen Hawking (2)
Cormac McCarthy (2)
Kenneth Grahame (2)
Charlotte Brontë (2)
Carl Sagan (1)
Paulo Coelho (1)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1)
Jean-Paul Sartre (1)

Related sources

1984 (4)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (3)
Ulysses (3)
Jane Eyre (2)
A Brief History of Time (2)
Foundation (2)
The Great Gatsby (2)
The Tempest (2)
The Wind in the Willows (2)
What's Wrong with the World (2)
State of the Union Address (1)
Long Walk to Freedom (1)
Cosmos (1)
Romeo and Juliet (1)
The Diary of a Young Girl (1)
The Alchemist (1)
Pride and Prejudice (1)
Middlemarch (1)
Kafka on the Shore (1)
Nausea (1)

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