quotations about the future
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
EMIL CIORAN
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History & Utopia
The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Fresh Air, Aug. 31, 1993
There is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
A fortune-teller may inform you, having pocketed your two guineas, that a rich uncle in Australia is going to leave you a million pounds next year. She doesn't promise you the million pounds herself; obviously that is coming to you anyhow, fortune-teller or no fortune-teller. There is no suggestion on her part that she is arranging your future for you. All that she promises to do for two guineas is to give you a little advance information. She tells you that you are coming into a million pounds next year, and if you believe it, I should say that it was well worth the money. You have a year's happiness (if that sort of thing makes you happy), a year in which to tell yourself in every trouble, "Never mind, there's a good time coming"; a year in which to make glorious plans for the future, to build castles in the air, or (if your taste is not for castles) country cottages and Mayfair flats. And all this for two guineas; it is amazingly cheap.
A. A. MILNE
If I May
Behind the curtain's mystic fold
The glowing future lies unrolled.
BRET HARTE
speech, Jan. 19, 1870
People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it.
RAY BRADBURY
Beyond 1984: The People Machines
To ordain the future in advance in this way, man must first have learned to distinguish necessary events from chance ones, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it, and in general be able to calculate and compute.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Genealogy of Morals
The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
Letters and Papers from Prison
When then things to come are said to be seen, it is not themselves which as yet are not (that is, which are to be), but their causes perchance or signs are seen, which already are.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Well the future for me is already a thing of the past.
BOB DYLAN
"Bye and Bye"
Of the future, man knows least; yet, about this, he worries most.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
speech in the House of Commons, Jun. 18, 1940
Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
NEIL GAIMAN
foreword, The Stars My Destination
The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.
HENRI BERGSON
Time and Free Will
You don't need to predict the future. Just choose a future -- a good future, a useful future -- and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
Don't tell me about the future. I've been all over the future. Spend half my time there. It's the same as anywhere else. Anywhen else. Whatever. Just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Mostly Harmless
Every second that passes is like a door that opens to allow in what has not yet happened, what we call the future, but, to challenge the contradictory nature of what we have just said, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the future is just an immense void, that the future is just the time on which the eternal present feeds.
JOSé SARAMAGO
The Double
My visions of the future are always pretty much standard issue. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer ... and there are flying cars.
JOSS WHEDON
foreword, Fray
The future must be met, however stern and iron it be.
ELIZABETH GASKELL
North and South
I've seen the future and the future's nothing new.
THE ALTERNATE ROUTES
"The Future's Nothing New"