Past Future Quotes

For every minute, the future is becoming the past. ~ Thor Heyerdahl

How can we prepare for the future if we won't acknowledge the past? ~ N.K. Jemisin

I felt cheated by the way grown-ups told me that the future of the world was bleak when I became a teenager in the 1970s. The pollution explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. I genuinely want the next generation, my own kids, to know that actually it's possible that the future might be better than the past. ~ Matt Ridley

We won't have come expecting gunfire. A shooter. As many times as it happens, as we see it happen on our screens, we still walk around in our lives thinking: No, not us, that happens to them, the people on the other side of the screen, the victims, their families, we don't know those people, we don't even know people who know those people, we're once and twice removed from most of what we see on the other side of the screen, especially that awful man, always a man, we watch and feel the horror, the unbelievable act, for a day, for two whole days, for a week, we post and click links and like and don't like and repost and then, and then it's like it didn't happen, we move on, the next thing comes. We get used to everything to the point that we even get used to getting used to everything. Or we only think we're used to it until the shooter, until we meet him in real life, when he's there with us, the shots will come from everywhere, inside, outside, past, future, now, and we won't know right away where the shooter is, the bodies will drop, the depths of the booms will make our hearts skip beats, the rush of panic and spark and sweat on our skin, nothing will be more real than the moment we know in our bones the end is near. ~ Tommy Orange

I know of no way of judging the future but by the past. ~ Patrick Henry

History would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past. ~ Arundhati Roy

The future influences the present just as much as the past. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Study the past if you would define the future. --CONFUCIUS ~ Steve Berry

You can't sail towards your future if you're still anchored in the past. ~ Julie-Anne

The future has NOTHING to do with the past. ~ Meir Ezra

The challenge of the unknown future is so much more exciting than the stories of the accomplished past. ~ Simon Sinek

The past has been given to us. The future must be built, as others have built our past. ~ Gladys Hasty Carroll

We change with time by how we view the future and reflect the past ~ Ronnie Cornelisz

You can never plan the future by the past. ~ Edmund Burke

[Y]ou cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past. ~ Jan Struther

Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past. ~ Norman Borlaug

You can lose your past by forgetting it but you can never lose your future because you can lose only the things you already own! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe. ~ Simone Weil

Present-moment awareness creates a gap not only in the stream of mind but also in the past-future continuum. Nothing truly new and creative can come into this world except through that gap, that clear space of infinite possibility. ~ Eckhart Tolle

When you stop looking over your shoulder, you shall see that the future is way nicer than the past. ~ Sylvia L'Namira

For those of us with an inward turn of mind, which is another name for melancholy introspection, the beginning of a new year inevitably leads to thoughts about both the future and the past. ~ Michael Dirda

Live in the present, forget the past. Give up hopes of future. ~ Sivananda

Writing, too, is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you wrote, it pours out of you. If you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don't only listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck.
Listening is receptivity. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write. You can take in the way things are without judgment, and the next day you can write the truth about the way things are."
...If you can capture the way things are that's all the poetry you ever need. ~ Natalie Goldberg

There is no justifiable prediction about how the hypothesis will hold up in the future; its degree of corroboration simply is a historical statement describing how severely the hypothesis has been tested in the past. ~ Robert Nozick

The future has a lot to do with the past. ~ Dwight Yoakam

The clock ticks; the taunting rhythm serving as a reminder that forward is the only way we can go. The mechanical heartbeat of the darkness, a cold ellipsis, punctuating years gone by.
Arising unchained.
No glorious hymn, just the steady beat of the illusion of time. We heal or we carry forward the weight of our wounds ... To believe otherwise is the mendacity of desperation.
Arising honestly.
The miles behind are littered with the weight of nostalgia, but too many miles lay ahead us to carry the weight. In the end, even echoes fade away.
Pen in hand ...
Arising to write the next chapter.
(MU Articles 2013, Dedication to Joey) ~ Shannon L. Alder

In charting our course to the future, we are mindful of our path from the past. ~ Brad Henry

There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past. ~ Jean Rostand

But what about "time"? After all it is not a bundle in which past, future and present are wrapped up together. Time is not a cage in which the "no longer now," the "not yet now," and the "now" are cooped up together. How do matters stand with "time"? They stand thus: time goes. And it goes in that it passes away. The passing of time is, of course, a coming, but a coming which goes, in passing away. What comes in time never comes to stay, but to go. What comes in time always bears beforehand the mark of going past and passing away. This is why everything temporal is regarded simply as what is transitory. ~ Martin Heidegger

The shutter of the photographer's camera makes that repeated mechanical sound. That unlocking and locking of the doors of light to send momentary images of the present into the light trap of the past. ~ Simon Mawer

I'm looking forward to the future, and feeling grateful for the past. ~ Mike Rowe

We can not have a future without respecting our past. ~ King Michael Of Romania

There's no future in spending our present worrying about our past. ~ Tom Wilson

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

In this bright future you can't forget your past. ~ Bob Marley

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past. ~ Bob Dylan

Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past. ~ Tony Judt

Call us the future from your past. ~ Fred Schneider

Elections are about the future. And the GOP will not win a campaign focused on the past. ~ Mark McKinnon

Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past. ~ Lytton Strachey

The traces of our life here will lie cold and still, dreaming, like the brittle eyes of dolls in an abandoned cabin, and the last men will look to them for explanations, or apologies. ~ Tim Cahill

After voluntary exertions on the part of our people to which the history of the world furnishes no parallel, is the old root of bitterness still to remain in the ground, to sprout and bear fruit in the future as it has borne fruit in the past? ~ Robert Dale Owen

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past. ~ Robertson Davies

Your best days are ahead of you, but living in the past is a sure way to never get there. ~ Richie Norton

Thinking about the future and thinking about the past is really only a way of ignoring the present. ~ Billy Corgan

Whatever made you successful in the past won't in future. ~ Lewis E. Platt

History is really a study of the future, not the past. ~ Arundhati Roy

Every woman is a hallway full of locked doors under different names: past, future, hopes, fears, lust, and love. Some men come with keys. Some men come with lick picks. Byron St. James comes with a chainsaw. ~ Jessica Gadziala

In my view, you can't go to the future if you haven't come from the past. ~ Iris Apfel

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn't make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past. ~ Bill Gates

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

The future struggles that it may not become the past. ~ Publilius Syrus

Denver is a city that will be far more defined by its future than its past. ~ John Hickenlooper

At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past. ~ Haruki Murakami

I saw her reflection behind me, in the mirror. I was speechless. Somehow I knew I wasn't allowed to turn around - it was against the rules, whatever the rules of the place were - but we could see each other, our eyes could meet in the mirror, and she was just as glad to see me as I was to see her. She was herself. An embodied presence. There was psychic reality to her, there was depth and information. She was between me and whatever place she had stepped from, what landscape beyond. And it was all about the moment when our eyes touched in the glass, surprise and amusement, her beautiful blue eyes with the dark rings around the irises, pale blue eyes with a lot of light in them: hello! Fondness, intelligence, sadness, humor. There was motion and stillness, stillness and modulation, and all the charge and magic of a great painting. Ten seconds, eternity. It was all a circle back to her. You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever: she existed only in the mirror, inside the space of the frame, and though she wasn't alive, not exactly, she wasn't dead either because she wasn't yet born, and yet never not born - as somehow, oddly, neither was I. And I knew that she could tell me anything I wanted to know (life, death, past, future) even though it was already there, in her smile, the answer to all questions ~ Donna Tartt

It is hard to say what the future holds, but this is probable - it won't be just like the past. ~ Tony Campolo

It is quite natural to think of the self as something concrete, but it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Rather, it is an abstract product of our minds, a convenient concept or schema that enables us to relate our present self with our past, future, and conditional selves, and thereby to create an illusion of coherence and continuity from a big jumble of disparate experiences. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum total of our ego defences, and that it is therefore tantamount to one gigantic ego defence, namely, the ego itself. The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home. ~ Neel Burton

You have to live in the future, not the past. ~ Gordon Brown

Everyone says that you should live like there is no tomorrow, but I think it's even more important to live like there is no yesterday. Your future means so much more than your past. ~ John A. Ashley

The future is the offspring of the present;
the present is the offspring of the past. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

We need to open up the future. We also need to keep everything valuable from the past. ~ John Eaton

I know not why there is such a melancholy feeling attached to the remembrance of past happiness, except that we fear that the future can have nothing so bright as the past. ~ Julia Ward Howe

We are always looking into the future, but we see only the past. ~ Sophie Swetchine

The past, future, or now, I'll find you - don't worry how. I have my ways, and one of these days. I'm gonna find you. I'm gonna find you. ~ Shani Petroff

It is better to build a home in the future than to build a palace in the past. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

I want my buildings to take root and look as if they've always been there. It isn't about pastiche or adapting what's already there. It's about trying to blend the future and the past. ~ Moshe Safdie

There has been enough blood in the Balkans. Serbia is offering its hand. Let us turn to the future and not deal with the past. ~ Ivica Dacic

I don't like regressing - I move beyond. Life belongs to the future and I believe in creating History rather than visiting and revisiting the past. ~ Amit Abraham

The past/future can't be changed! The things which are written to happen, they
can't be skipped. ~ Deyth Banger

A Christian people doesn't mean a lot of goody-goodies. The Church has plenty of stamina, and isn't afraid of sin. On the contrary, she can look it in the face calmly and even take it upon herself, assume it at times, as Our Lord did. When a good workman's been at it for a whole week, surely he's due for a booze on Saturday night. Look: I'll define you a Christian people by the opposite. The opposite of a Christian people is a people grown sad and old. You'll be saying that isn't a very theological definition. I agree...

Why does our earliest childhood always seem so soft and full of light? A kid's got plenty of troubles, like everybody else, and he's really so very helpless, quite unarmed against pain and illness. Childhood and old age should be the two greatest trials of mankind. But that very sense of powerlessness is the mainspring of a child's joy. He just leaves it all to his mother, you see. Present, past, future -- his whole life is caught up in one look, and that look is a smile. Well, lad, if only they'd let us have our way, the Church might have given men that supreme comfort. Of course they'd each have their own worries to grapple with, just the same. Hunger, thirst, poverty, jealousy -- we'd never be able to pocket the devil once and for all, you may be sure. But man would have known he was the son of God; and therein lies your miracle. He'd have lived, he'd have died with that idea in his noddle -- and not just a notion picked up in books either -- oh ~ Georges Bernanos

As we come into balance within ourselves and the all that is, we balance the past, future and our Earth. ~ Jan Porter

When your future arrives, will you blame your past? ~ Robert Half

Free men and women ... can think across time, viewing their own lives, inclusive of past, present, and future, as architectural wholes, static in mental space. They can therefore see, as others cannot, the cracks and buttresses of repeated action, the points of stress, the established framework. They are not perfect; but they are less imperfect than we by a full dimension of being. ~ Robert Grudin

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

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

Its more fun to think of the future than dwell on the past. ~ Sara Shepard

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past. ~ Eric Hoffer

Without a past, future, or name who are you? Nobody? Without a past, future, or name do you have a problem? ~ Bert McCoy

I turned away from him and went on my way, up the street and about my business. The past was dead. The future was resignation, fatality, and could only end one way now. The present was numbness, that could feel nothing. Like Novocaine needled into your heart. What was there in all the dimensions of time for me? ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER) ~ Cornell Woolrich

Create your future from your future not your past. ~ Werner Erhard

She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past. ~ Mohsin Hamid

Remember, grab you're future with both hands and mold it into what you want it to be. It's the determined, who create the life they want, while the idle sit by and watch it fade away into nothingness. The future belongs to the exceptional individuals, who can see the light of the future, at the end of the tunnel. ~ James D. Watson

We can drift along as though there were still a cold war, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons that will never be used, ignoring the problems of people in this country and around the world, being one of the worst environmental violators on earth, standing against any sort of viable programs to protect the world's forests or to cut down on acid rain or the global warming or ozone depletion. We can ignore human rights violations in other countries, or we can take these things on as true leaders ought to and accept the inspiring challenge of America for the future. ~ Jimmy Carter

winning or losing an agonist encounter has a dramatic impact on future aggressive behavior. Winners are more likely to initiate attacks against unknown opponents, whereas losers are more circumspect and likely to retreat from unfamiliar conspecifics, adopting an opportunistic strategy, picking and choosing their fights. In the worst case scenario, animals socially subjugated by constant threat and attack from dominant conspecifics develop a submissive phenotype, showing little or no aggressive behavior, essentially eliminating themselves from the gene pool. ~ Randy J. Nelson

It seems an easy choice - sacrifice the tree for a human life - until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated. Suddenly we must confront some tough questions. How important are the medical needs of future generations? ~ Al Gore

Unless physicians stand together to fight threats and injustices, our practices cannot remain viable in the future. ~ Samuel Wilson

God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us. ~ Joel Osteen

Death is a part of Life, they are dancing together the dance of infinity in front of the gates of Time. We can live our dreams as we are dreaming our future. Time is the Endless Consciousness ~ Grigoris Deoudis

But, look, it is good to have a dream so long as you do not let it gnaw at the substance of your present. I have seen men consumed by their dreams, and it is a sour business. If you cling too tightly to a dream - a poodle bitch or a personal sausage chef or whatever - then you miss the felicity of your heart beating and the smell of the grass growing and the sounds lizards make when you run through the neighborhood with our friend. Your dream should be like a favorite old bone that you savor and cherish and chew upon gently. Then, rather than stealing from you a wasted sigh or the life of an idle hour, it nourishes you, and you become strangely contented by nostalgia for a possible future, so juicy with possibility and redolent of sautéed garlic and decadent slabs of bacon that you feel full when you've eaten nothing. And then, one fine day when the sun smiles upon your snout, then the time is right, you bite down hard. The dream is yours. And then you
chew on the next one. ~ Kevin Hearne

We need to preserve these sacred locations for ourselves, for the species of plants and animals that coexist in harmony there, and for the future generations of humankind that will need to be refreshed, renewed and healed by them. ~ Frederick Lenz

I want to have all that scientific information that we're building be used in designing the future so that people who make geographic decisions - and here it's not just land-use planners, but it's everyone: foresters, transportation engineers, people who buy a house - can analyze all of these information layers and design a future. ~ Jack Dangermond

A near win shifts our view of the landscape. It can turn future goals, which we tend to envision at a distance, into more proximate events. We consider temporal distance as we do spatial distance. (Visualize a great day tomorrow and we see it with granular, practical clarity. But picture what a great day in the future might be like, not tomorrow but fifty years from now, and the image will be hazier.) ~ Sarah Lewis

This is it-the life I saw when I dreamed of our future. It was always you, me, and her, but this is just the beginning. There's so much more to come. More life together. More happiness. More babies. ~ Georgia Cates

The Good News is that when we trust God's grace to save us through what Jesus did, our sins are forgiven, we get a purpose for living, and we are promised a future home in heaven. ~ Rick Warren

Heaven gives us hope - hope for today and hope for the future. No matter what we're facing, we know it is only temporary, and ahead of us is Heaven. ~ Billy Graham

With all these occurrences of death facing me, I thought about issues of freedom. If government projects the idea that we, as people inhabiting this particular land mass, have freedom, then for the rest of our lives we will go out and find what appear to be the boundaries and smack against them like a heart against the rib cage. If we reveal boundaries in the course of our movements, then we will expose the inherent lie in the use of the word freedom. I want to keep breathing and moving until I arrive at a place where motion and strength and relief intersect. I don't know what's ahead of me in the course of my life and this civilization. I just don't feel I have reached the necessary things inside my history that would ease the pressure in my skull and in my future and in my present. It is exhausting, living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them. ~ David Wojnarowicz

Sound public finances are the essential foundation on which to construct a better-balanced economy from the wreckage of Labour's boom and bust. But it is economic growth that will create the jobs and the prosperity for the future and enable us to pay down Labour's debt. ~ Philip Hammond

Remember that the future is not somewhere we are going, it is something we are creating. Everyday we do things that make some futures more probable and others less likely. ~ Ian Lowe

It was quite tough, not many opportunities.
I remember in primary school, one of my teachers said, "As for you young man, you haven't got much of a future." ~ John Ilhan

Knowledge is earned by those who seek for it and can only be found in the future, Start looking ahead". ~ Kervinsky Casseus