Topic

Future

James opens honestly: we live by today's truth and must be ready to call it falsehood tomorrow. Longfellow: act in the living present, let the dead past bury itself. Thoreau: what lies within us is larger than either what lies behind or what lies ahead. Curie believes humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries. Bacon refuses to consider himself old. The collection is neither pessimistic nor conventionally optimistic: it is interested in the future as a problem you live inside rather than plan for from a safe distance. These writers favor action in the present over preparation for a later moment that may not arrive on schedule — or at all.

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Quotes

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Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future

Source: A Woman of No Importance (1893)

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough

The best of prophets of the future is the past

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

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities

Yesterday is but today's memory, and tomorrow is today's dream

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet

I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they now do

The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century

The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today

I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward

We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions

The present is never our end; the past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end.

Source: Pensees, fragment 172 (1670)

I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday and I love today

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt

Sit by me, my beloved, and listen to my heart; smile, for your happiness is a symbol of our future

Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator

The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.