c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition
— William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
In racing, they say that your car goes where your eyes go. The driver who cannot tear his eyes away from the wall as he spins out of control will meet that wall; the driver who looks down the track as he feels his tires break free will regain control of his vehicle.
— Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
People don't realize that the future is just now, but later.
— Russell Brand
I still wake with your name on my lips every morning.
— Melina Marchetta, Froi of the Exiles
And it's best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it's bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen.
— Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
I just want to let you know that when I look into my future, I see nothing but you.” That’s what Chaz had whispered in my ear at some point during the wedding last night.Then he’d whispered. “And you’re not even wearing Spanx.
— Meg Cabot
But the future must be met, however stern and iron it be. 
— Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most 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
A very wise man once told me that you can't look back-you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.
— Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
— Albert Einstein
Other men look up and down, left and right; but men like us are different. We are visionaries.
— Eoin Colfer, Airman
There are different ways to be confused about how someone's disappointed you. Some lie about the future because they wanted to forget the past. But some will lie about the past because they think it will give you both a future.
— Laura Dave, The Divorce Party
The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.
— Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.
— Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future. 
— Winston S. Churchill
I don't want a future, I want a present. To me this appears of greater value. You have a future only when you have no present, and when you have a present, you forget to even think about the future.
— Robert Walser, The Tanners
When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I was watching a collection of vintage '80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes.
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Don't entrust your future on others' hands. Rather make decisions by yourself with the help of God's guidance. Hold your beliefs so tight and never let go of them!
— Hark Herald Sarmiento
Why don’t you focus on where you’re going and less on where you came from?
— Amy Harmon, A Different Blue
One mustn't dream of one's future
—  one must earn it.
The time has come to lay that baggage down and leave behind all the struggling and striving. You can be set free as you journey forward into a balanced healthy and rewarding future.
— Sue Augustine, When Your Past Is Hurting Your Present: Getting Beyond  Fears That Hold You Back
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
I figured something out," he said aloud. "The future is unpredictable."Hassan said, "Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice.
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
[..]Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species."Yes? Why is that?"Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [..]
— Michael Crichton, The Lost World
What's the Future? It's a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren't the lines we wanted.
— John Marsden, The Dead of Night
The past is to be respected and acknowledged, but not worshipped; it is our future in which we will find our greatness.
— Pierre Trudeau
The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.
— Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God
You can't do anything about the past, it's done and can't be mended. But the future is different, if you just think what you really want and reach out and take it.
— Lesley Pearse, Trust Me
Guys like us got nothing to look ahead to.
— John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
I was doing something I'd never done before. And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.
— Alan Moore, Watchmen
To dream the future is much more better than to regret the past.But the best of all, to live in the present life with all of your power.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.
— H.P. Lovecraft
At times it may seem as though you and your past are one. Sometimes we fail to differentiate between what has happened to us and who we are today. If you have a hard time getting beyond that damaging mind-set let me encourage you right now. You are not your past Although you are changed and shaped by past experiences who you were yesterday does not control the person you have the potential to become tomorrow.
— Sue Augustine, When Your Past Is Hurting Your Present: Getting Beyond  Fears That Hold You Back
When we put things off until some future-probably mythical-Laterland, we drag the past into the future. The burden of yesterday's incompletions is a heavy load to carry. Don't carry it.
— Peter McWilliams
Always remember that the future comes one day at a time.
— Dean Acheson
The future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises.
— Steven Erikson
I know absolutely nothing about where I'm going. I'm fine with that. I'm happy about it. Before, I had nothing. I had no life, no friends, and no family really, and I didn't really care. I had nothing, and nothing to lose, and then I knew loss. What I cared about was gone; it was all lost. Now I have everything to gain; everything is a clean slate. It's all blank pages waiting to be written on. It's all about going forward. It's all about uncertainty and possibilities.
— Gregory Galloway, As Simple as Snow
Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.
— Kahlil Gibran
The future is up for grabs. It belongs to any and all who will take the risk and accept the responsibility of consciously creating the future they want.
— Robert Anton Wilson
The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport. 
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Words! What power they hold. Once they have rooted in your psyche, it is difficult to escape them. Words can shape the future of a child and destroy the existence of an adult.Words are powerful. Be careful how you use them because once you have pronounced them, you cannot remove the scar they leave behind.
— Vashti Quiroz-Vega
This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
— Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World
We mourn the future because it's easier than admitting that we're miserable in the present.
— Robyn Schneider, Extraordinary Means
We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window. 
— Peter F. Drucker
A thousand years from now nobody is going to know that you or I ever lived. The cynic is right, but lazy. He says ‘You live, you die and nothing you do will ever make a difference.’ But as long as I live, I’m going to be like Beethoven and shake my fist at fate and try to do something for those who live here now and who knows how far into the future that will go. If I accomplish nothing more than making my arm sore, at least I will be satisfied that I have lived.
— Jackson Burnett, The Past Never Ends
The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little while.
— Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist
Do not despair, my friend. Today is theirs, but the future is ours
— Rodman Philbrick, The Last Book in the Universe
The future is what matters — because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present — like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
When I read that the flash came, and I took a sheet of paper. . .and I wrote on it: I, Emily Byrd Starr, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the Alpine Path and write my name on the scroll of fame.
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon
The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.
— Leonard Sweet
The future belongs, not to those who have the most, but to those who do the most with what they have.
— Eugene P. Odum
People do this a lot. They don't seem to realise that the future is just like now, but in a little while, so they say they're going to do things in anticipation of some kind of seismic shift in their worldview that never actually materialises. But everything's not going to be made of leather, the world won't stink of sherbet. Tomorrow is not some mythical kingdom where you'll grow butterfly wings and be able to talk to animals - you'll basically feel pretty much the same way you do at the moment.
— Russell Brand, My Booky Wook
And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Well, we must wait for the future to show.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates throughout the surrounding area. What comes out of the pond after that? All we can do is stare at the pond, holding our breath.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
She had no idea what the future would hold for any of them, beyond possibilities as infinite as the stars. And really, that was enough.
— Melissa Landers, Starflight
All we have is now, this moment. If you live in the future, you’ll miss things, right here, right now, and you’ll regret it later.
— Jessica Therrien, Oppression
...Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce.
— Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow
Naturally, one does not normally discuss plans to commit murder with the intended victim.
— Robert J. Sawyer, Flashforward
The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.
— Bruce Sterling
...can I tell you something...? I don't think you're in love with the past. I think you're scared of the future.
— Brad Meltzer, The Inner Circle
There are two types of visions. Those that will happen no matter what, and those that can be stopped. Now more than ever, I wish I could tell them apart.
— Emlyn Chand, Farsighted
My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.
— Charles F. Kettering Foundation
Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:Increasing efficiencyIncreasing opportunityIncreasing emergenceIncreasing complexityIncreasing diversityIncreasing specializationIncreasing ubiquityIncreasing freedomIncreasing mutualismIncreasing beautyIncreasing sentienceIncreasing structureIncreasing evolvability
— Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
Life wore a man out, wore a man thin.Tomorrow would be a better day.
— Charles Bukowski, Pulp
What hasty preperations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we’re sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we’ll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equipped for the dawn.
— Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea
One of the things that therapists do if you are suicidal, like a trick, is ask you about the future. They want to know what your plans are. Do you want to be the president? Do you want to be a rock star? They want to know if you want to live later even if you want to die now.
— Albert Borris, Crash Into Me
No, really,' I said. 'I think she's great. And I honestly like her about twenty more times now than I did when we were dating. But love needs to have a future. And Sofia and I don't have a future. We've just had a good time sharing the present, that's all.
— David Levithan, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares
But let no person say what they would or would not do, since we are not judges for ourselves until circumstances call us to act.
— Abigail Adams
You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.
— Joel Salatin, Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide to Farm Friendly Food
Ultimately, we are all products of the experiences we have and the decisions we make as children, and it remains a peculiar detail of human condition that something as precious as the future is entrusted to us when we possess so little foresight. Perhaps that's what makes hindsight so intriguing. When you're young the future is a blank canvas, but looking back you are always able to see the big picture.
— Simon Pegg, Nerd Do Well
You can only take steps toward the future you want. It's not guaranteed to be there. This is why you have to live inside each beautiful or terrible thing as it happens to you because the present may be all you've got. And if there's more ahead then the present is where you can really shape your future.
— Amanda Howells, The Summer of Skinny Dipping
A man follows the path laid out for him. He does his duty to God and his King. He does what he must do, not what pleases him. God's truth, boy, what kind of world would this be if every man did what pleased him alone? Who would plough the fields and reap the harvest, if every man had the right to say, 'I don't want to do that.' In this world there is a place for every man, but every man must know his place.
— Wilbur Smith, Monsoon
What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.
— Graham Swift, Waterland
Your future is your own again. And I consider that to be a happy ending to the story.
— Lisa Mangum, The Forgotten Locket
I will never forget your fire. I can't wait to see what you do.
— Kiera Cass, Happily Ever After
Young men speak about the future because they have no past, and old men speak of the past because they have no future.
— Boyd K. Packer
I can’t take back the past, but I can fight for the future.
— Shannon A. Thompson, Death Before Daylight
I figured that when there's no way of knowing what the future holds it's just as easy to believe it'll be good as to believe it'll be bad.
— Jean Ferris, Twice Upon a Marigold
I don't know where I'm going to be in three years. Because I have the feeling that the future is so full of possibilities, to stop being an actress, to do something else... for me, the future is just a huge bunch of discoveries.
— Audrey Tautou
The future is in the skies.
— Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.
— George Orwell, 1984
You know what the great thing about babies is? They are like little bundles of hope. Like the future in a basket.
— Lish McBride, Hold Me Closer, Necromancer
Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now--in this bright, laughing moment--and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.
— Clive Barker, Abarat
One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future.
— Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic
What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
— Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
Josh will begin disappearing into a future where the only place he and I remain friends is on the Internet.
— Jay Asher, The Future of Us
And the reason I am so nervous is that everything I do now is leading me to one of three possible futures... Which one will it be? Time alone will tell. But still I know that writing this diary can perhaps provide the answer
—  it may even help produce the right future.
You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.
— E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops
Be careful not to look so far ahead, that you miss what’s in front of you
— Jeremy Aldana
We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
— John Buchan
Night is mine, together with a substantial part of the future.
— Nelly Kaplan
Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.
— Kathleen Norris
And then his lips were on mine and we were in it, pulling away from the past and rushing fast into the future.
— Renee Carlino, Before We Were Strangers
The world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. We’re lucky to be living now.
— Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
You are the fairy tale told by your ancestors.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Everywhere I looked, demons of the future [were] on the battlegrounds of one’s emotional plane.
— David Bowie
Menacing lines of black tomorrows on the horizon.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans, Becalmed
Just because you don't know what you want yet, it doesn't mean that there's nothing to want.
— Emily Henry, The Love That Split the World
Burning bridges behind you is understandable. It's the bridges before us that we burn, not realizing we may need to cross, that brings regret.
— Anthony Liccione
Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.
— Chris Bohjalian, The Law of Similars
Learning to live on less pride has been a great investment in my future.
— Katerina Stoykova Klemer
does a society exist where it's become acceptable to wear 'helmets' enclosing one's entire head when in public to preempt social interaction
— Tao Lin
People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
People from the past, have a tendency to walk back into the present, and run over the future.
— Anthony Liccione
You can only take steps toward the future you want. It's not guaranteed to be there.
— Amanda Howells, The Summer of Skinny Dipping
Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.
— André Breton
You are never too old to set a new goal or to dream a new dream.
— C.S. Lewis
As each wave of technology is released. It must be accompanied by a demand for new skills, new language. Consumers must constantly update their ways of thinking, always questioning their understanding of the world. Going back to old ways, old technology is forbidden. There in no past, no present, only an endless future of inadequacy
— Richard Kadrey
Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.
— Mattie J.T. Stepanek
It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!
— André Breton
I'm not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would the future be
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
All that sunny afternoon, traveling north and east, Caroline believed absolutely in the future. And why not? For if the worst had already happened to them in the eyes of the world, then surely, surely, it was the worst that they left behind them now.
— Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter
The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
— Mohsin Hamid, Moth Smoke
Any system which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach.
— Isaac Asimov
We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.
— George Orwell, 1984
I know too well howgood-bye can steal more than just the future.
— Talia Vance, Spies and Prejudice
Jesus, I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're going to do. I'm just going to do it.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
Of this I am certain, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
— Winston S. Churchill
I wasn't scared of losing my past. i was scared of losing my future.
— Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now
It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.
— Voltaire
Am I worried about the future? I don't know. When I think of the word it's like seeing a cavity, a space where a tooth used to be.
— Kirsty Eagar, Raw Blue
Have you noticed," she asked him, "how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?
— Mary Balogh, Simply Magic
...I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.
— Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
C'mon, let's get out of here. I have a future to attend to.
— Melissa Good, Tropical Storm
Sometimes, Anu, we have to take actions that make us sad because it's the right thing to do for the future.
— Michelle Moran, Rebel Queen
The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.
— Peter Benchley, Jaws
‎I cannot alter the past, but the future is very much in my hands.
— Mary Lydon Simonsen, The Perfect Bride for Mr. Darcy
He knew that all the hazards and perils were now drawing together to a point: the next day would be a day of doom, the day of final effort or disaster, the last gasp.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Instead of fearing the future, I should live and enjoy the present, she told herself.
— Melissa de la Cruz, Misguided Angel
What you listen in heart, are echoes of the past.What you write today, will be echoed in the future.
— Toba Beta
It's not technology that limits us. We're the limitation. Our technology is an expression of our intelligence and creativity, so the limitations of our technology are a reflection of our own limitations. We can't fundamentally advance technology until we fundamentally advance ourselves.
— Christian Cantrell
Was that what it meant to be alive - moving from a brightly lit corridor into a darkened room at every step? Sometimes it felt that way.
— Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead
What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery, and-let’s be frank—fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels. There might be great illicit loves, enduring joy, faith-shaking accidents with farm machinery. But you have to not know in order to see what stories your life’s efforts bring you. The mystery is all.
— Lorrie Moore, Birds of America
He had built his own future brick by brick around himself but there were no doors or windows, at least that was the way it seemed at the time he had thought to himself, I am locked in, it was like one of those ghost stories where you wake up and you are sealed in a coffin.
— Dan Chaon, Stay Awake
No course was open to me save to leap, with eyes self-bound, into the yawning abyss of the future.
— William Beckford, The Episodes of Vathek
What is the future going to be like, then?' 'Hey, it's gonna be a gas,' Scape assured me. 'If you're into machines and stuff - like I am - you'd go for it. People are gonna have all kinds of shit. Do whatever they want with it. That's why it didn't faze me when ol' Bendray first told me about wanting to blow up the world. Hey - in the Future, everybody will want to!
— K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
— Emil M. Cioran
Dr. Blockhead's mocking face was solemn for once. 'Modern science is wiping out deviant strains of the human form,' he said. 'In the twenty-first century, genetic engineering will do more than merely eliminate Siamese twins and alligator-skinned people. It will make it hard to find a person with even a slight overbite or a large nose. I can see that future and it makes me shudder. The future looks like- him'Dr. Blockhead pointed at Mulder.'Imagine going through your whole life looking like that,' said Dr. Blockhead.Mulder shrugged. 'It's a tough job- but someone has to do it.
— Les Martin, Humbug
The past is like a great stone that lies on the bed of a river, hidden from view but shaping the currents of the water as it flows by. You cannot read the currents in the river of your own life, and navigate them safely, if you do not understand what causes them. You must know your past, for it will shape your future.
— Derdriu in Viking Warrior by Judson Roberts
I have a dream, there will be critical point in the future,where economics and technology will negate each other.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Two Songs For The World's End I Bombs ripen on the leafless tree under which the children play. And there my darling all alone dances in the spying day. I gave her nerves to feel her pain, I put her mortal beauty on. I taught her love that hate might find, its black work the easier done. I sent her out alone to play; and I must watch, and I must hear, how underneath the leafless tree, the children dance and sing with Fear. II Lighted by the rage of time where the blind and dying weep, in my shadow take your sleep, though wakeful I. Sleep unhearing while I pray - Should the red tent of the sky fall to fold your time away, wake to weep before you die. Die believing all is true that love your maker said to you Still believe that had you lived you would have found love, world, sight, sound, sorrow, beauty - all true. Grieve for death your moment - grieve. The world, the lover you must take, is the murderer you will meet. But if you die before you wake never think death sweet.
— Judith A. Wright, Collected Poems, 1942 1970
In the past the need for a hierarchal form of society has been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and the priests, lawyers and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of an imaginary world beyond the grave.
— George Orwell, 1984
It was summer and moonlight and we had lemonade to drink, and we held the cold glasses in our hands, and Dad read the stereo-newspapers inserted into the special hat you put on your head and which turned the microscopic page in front of the magnifying lens if you blinked three times in succession.
— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
Darling, don't be silly, your whole future is ahead of you. All you have to do is go out there and ask for a part- something small and reasonable just to start with. From there, no one can stop you. Don't feel bad about anything you've done, and for God's sake, have fun.
— Anna Godbersen
Though I imagine we're killing ourselves right now in all manner of ways that'll seem insane to people in the future. And as doors to the next world go, a bog ain't a bad choice. It's not quite water and it's not quite land - it's an in-between place.
— Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
The future cannot be determined. I can only be experienced as it is occurring. Life doesn't know what it will be until it notices what it has become.
— Margaret J. Wheatley, A Simpler Way
The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.
— John Sladek
How can we prepare for the future if we won’t acknowledge the past?
— N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky
I don't think much about guys from the past. I'm glad I knew them, but there's a reason they didn't make it into my future.
— Lorraine Zago Rosenthal
I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.
— Hugo Cabret
Let's just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today, and let's trust the future to tomorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies!
— Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl
Neither mine nor other people's prospects seem particularly pleasing just at the moment, and I have fantasies of going to Iceland, never to return. As it is, I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.
— Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer
Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.
— William Osler
Imagination paints a charming view of the future, conveniently adapted to the demands of our current emotion.
— John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy
I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain further here. I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight than mine--if, indeed, they ever discover it-- at least in our time. 'For who knoweth what is good for man in this life?--and who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?
— Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
The key to making healthy decisions is to respect your future self. Honor him or her. Treat him or her like you would treat a friend or a loved one.
— A.J. Jacobs, Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection
To envision the future
—  you must forget the past and make the present a memory
Although I am no longer caught in the past, the future seems like a ridiculous thing to me. Try to catch it, hold it in your hand. It disappears every time.
— Alice Hoffman, Green Heart
Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action.
— James Luceno, Darth Plagueis
I wasn't used to looking ahead. Not like Jack. Maybe that was why he had that ready grin. I could see through the dust, but he could see through time, and he didn't even need magic to do it.
— Sarah Zettel, Dust Girl
If I could somehow know the future, then now should not be like this time.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
There were certain moments upon which the whole of the future course of one's life might turn. And almost inevitably they popped out at one without any warning at all, leaving one with no time to consider or engage in a reasoned debate with oneself. One had to make a split second decision, and much depended upon it. Perhaps everything.
— Mary Balogh, At Last Comes Love
There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learned to separate them.
— J.D. Bernal, world, the flesh and the devil: an inquiry into the future of the three enemies of the rational soul
I started to sway Lexi again when I realized she was quiet. Waiting. Both of us paused on the cusp of the unknown. I couldn't go backward or even retrace my own steps, let alone Xanda's. I could only go forward. The threads of time weren't unraveling but weaving into a tapestry -- a future, and a hope. The only way to discover was to step into it.
— Holly Cupala, Tell Me a Secret
The only thing that is sure about the future is that it will happen. The only thing not sure about the future is what will happen".
— Ronald Green
Future is ours, but victory is mine!
— cG9sYXJhZGl0aWE=
To four years until freedom," she said lifting her glass.He raised his in salute. "To you, Celaena." Their eyes met, and Chaol didn't hide his smile as she grinned at him. Perhaps four years with her might not be enough.
— Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass
The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.
— J.G. Ballard
Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next d
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Tomorrow’s sun is on it’s way – a relentless sun, inscrutable like life.
— Machado de Assis, The Devil's Church and Other Stories
I aspired to be the better me of my future.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
A world full of people who want to know what you will be, what is your skill and what is your purpose. In the north, if a man had come and said "What will you be? What will you do?" I would have laughed at this kind of person that lives all the time in the future.
— Daniel Mason, A Far Country
Yesterday is but to-day’s memory and to-morrow is to-day’s dream.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
I can't see the future. But when I dreamed of the future, he was the one I was tied to.
— Nancy Straight, Blood Debt
Future is an enemy territory
—  we cannot know what will happen to us over there!
The man of the future will be young or he will not be.
— Régis Debray, A Modest Proposal: A Plan for the Golden Years
What an irony it is that these living beings whose shade we sit in,whose fruit we eat, whose limbs we climb, whose roots we water, towhom most of us rarely give a second thought, are so poorlyunderstood. We need to come, as soon as possible, to a profoundunderstanding and appreciation for trees and forests and the vitalrole they play, for they are among our best allies in the uncertainfuture that is unfolding.
— Jim Robbins, The Man Who Planted Trees: Lost Groves, Champion Trees, and an Urgent Plan to Save the Planet
Nothing is but what is now
— Ron Rash, Serena
Our past cannot be changed, and to be preoccupied with it is inefficient in time and effort. Likewise, by fretting over the future, we only exhaust ourselves, making us less able to effectively respond when the future is actually upon us. By worrying about a mishap that may or may not take place, we’re forced to undergo the event twice—once when imagining it and once again if and when we actually experience it.
— H.E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation
I stole their future from them
—  I can only being to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I was not predicting the future, I was trying to prevent it.
— Ray Bradbury
The young should not think of themselves as immature and the elderly need not view themselves as feeble. Our minds control our bodies. Have no age, transcend both past and future, and enter into naka-ima—the “eternal present.
— H.E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation
If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths:  Selected Stories and Other Writings
By keeping the mind in the present, unless you deliberately want to contemplate the past or future, it’s possible to firmly face life without fear. Then, no thoughts of past failures or future problems will exist in the mind, and a truly positive mental state will result—fudoshin, the “immovable mind.
— H.E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation
I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.
— Muhammad Yunus
If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.
— Blaise Pascal
There were seven men, but just one language. They also moved as one and ate one meal a day and slept in the same bed and knew the same women with whom they'd made the same child. They worked for the same firm as the father. They were the future.
— Blake Butler, There Is No Year
How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
Since the future's so iffy, I'll turn my attention to the past.
— Manil Suri, The City of Devi
The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky
The tribe often thinks the visionary has turned his back on them. When, in fact, the visionary has simply turned his face to the future.
— Ray A. Davis
The past, present, and future, were all equally in gloom.
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply: 'Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
— Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right
This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe
— Jimmy Carter
It wasn't what lay at the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road itself. No milestones marked its progress. No trees grew along it. No dappled shadows shaded it. No mists rolled over it. No birds circled it. No twists, no turns or hairpin bends obscured even momentarily, her clear view of the end. This filled Ammu with an awful dread, because she was not the kind of woman who wanted her future told. She dreaded it too much. So if she were granted one small wish perhaps it would have been Not to Know, Not to know what each day had in store for her. Not to know where she might be, next month, next year. Ten years on. Not to know which way her road might turn and what lay beyond the bend.
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Why does every road eventually narrow into a point at the horizon? Because that's where the point lies.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
The future is like a corridor into which we can see only by the light coming from behind.
— Edward Weyer Jr.
Imagination sees the complete reality, - it is where past, present and future meet... Imagination is limited neither to the reality which is apparent - nor to one place. It lives everywhere. It is at a centre and feels the vibrations of all the circles within which east and west are virtually included. Imagination is the life of mental freedom. It realizes what everything is in its many aspects ... Imagination does not uplift: we don't want to be uplifted, we want to be more completely aware.
— Kahlil Gibran
The past is bound to be fragmentary, bound to be reconstructed, bound to be reinvented. It serves only to collect the truths of today. If our present is the child of the past, our past is the child of the present. And the future will be the harvester of our bastard offspring.
— Amin Maalouf, Orígenes
So much American science fiction is parochial -- not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way...
— Poul Anderson