Quotes and passages on the future

The future belongs to those who
believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The future is simply infinite possibility waiting to happen. What it waits on is human imagination to crystallize its possibility. Leland Kaiser

Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time? My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future. Jonathan Safran Foer Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one. George Harrison

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so. Noam Chomsky We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future. Franklin D. Roosevelt

I never think of the future--it comes soon enough.

Albert Einstein

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If we are worried about the future, then we must
look today at the upbringing of children.

Gordon B. Hinckley
Standing for Something

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if
you have to, with the same weapons of reason which
today arm you against the present.

Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people:
those who let it happen, those who make it happen,
and those who wonder what happened.

John M. Richardson, Jr.

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The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.

Abraham Lincoln

The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths
offered by the present, but a place that is created--created first
in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not
some place we are going to, but one we are creating.

John Schaar

The future you shall know when it has come; before then, forget it.

Aeschylus

Nobody can really guarantee the future. The best we can do is
size up the chances, calculate the risks involved, estimate our
ability to deal with them and then make our plans with confidence.

Henry Ford II

The minute you alter your perception of yourself and your
future, both you and your future begin to change.

Marilee Zdenek

The future is literally in our hands to mold as we like.
But we cannot wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow is now.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only
connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the
dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in
something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach
has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Steve Jobs

Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow
belongs to those who prepare for it today.

Malcom X

You are always free to change your mind and choose
a different future, or a different past.

Richard Bach

Let others leave their future in someone else's hands, but not you.

Jim Rohn

Tomorrow may never come to us. We do not live in tomorrow.
We cannot find it in any of our title-deeds. The person who owns
whole blocks of real estate, and great ships on the sea, does not
own a single minute of tomorrow. Tomorrow! It is a mysterious
possibility, not yet born. It lies under the seal of midnight--
behind the veil of glittering constellations.

E.H. Chapin

The future is still not here, and cannot become a part of experienced reality
until it is present. Since what we know of the future is made up of purely
abstract and logical elements—inferences, guesses, deductions—it cannot
be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is
to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the
faster it runs ahead, This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why
hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more.
Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of
such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.

Alan Watts
The Wisdom of Insecurity

the past - today - now

In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death.
In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world
without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world
without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and
people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.

Alan Lightman
Einstein's Dreams

Be of good cheer. Do not think of today's failures, but of the success that
may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you
will succeed if you persevere, and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles.
Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.

Helen Keller

Human beings appear to be happy just so long as they have a future
to which they can look forward—whether it be a “good time” tomorrow
or an everlasting life beyond the grave. For various reasons, more and
more people find it hard to believe in the latter. On the other hand, the
former has the disadvantage that when this “good time” arrives, it is
difficult to enjoy it to the full without some promise of more to come.
If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we
are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future,
and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

Alan Watts
The Wisdom of Insecurity

There are those of us who are prisoners of the future. We don't
know what will happen but we worry so much that the future
becomes a kind of prison. The real future is made only of one
substance, and that is the present. What else can the future be
made of? If we know how to take care of the present moment
the best we can, that's all we can do to assure ourselves of a
good future. We build the future by taking care of the present moment.

Thich Nhat Hanh
How to Walk