Rethinking The Future Quotes

When I turned to climb the third wave, I saw at my feet a small leaf, perhaps an inch long, pointed, withered to bright chestnut but still smooth. It was supported above the soil in the grey points of short grasses which did not bend beneath its weightlessness. It was curved in all three planes. Fibrous veins displayed its structure. It was quite still. And as I watched its stillness spread; first to me. I wanted not to move by a hair's breadth. Lest the bond between it and me should break. The stillness spread to the grass around us. It encompassed the hill. The beech wood became attendant on it. The whole valley slowly filled with it. The leaf, and I its participant, had drawn the mileswide landscape into an attentive, breathless synthesis ... there was no movement, no sound and no distinction or identifying of parts in all that had been there united. For there was no 'I' that gazed ... through that tiny gateway I became one with what was boundless. ~ Geoffrey Vickers

Good thoughts yield good things. The future, no matter how dark it seems, can always change, as long as the thoughts change. ~ R.A. Montgomery

There's been a big void out there, in terms of where I've been and what I am currently working on, I'd like to fill that void now and share my exciting plans for the future. ~ Priscilla Presley

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, fellow members of the motion picture industry and honored guests: This is one of the happiest moments of my life, and I want to thank each one of you who had a part in selecting me for one of their awards, for your kindness. It has made me feel very, very humble; and I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything that I may be able to do in the future. I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry. My heart is too full to tell you just how I feel, and may I say thank you and God bless you. ~ Hattie McDaniel

When you are unsure about the future, keep doing what is in front of you with all your heart and with love, and what is meant for you will find you. ~ Gurumayi Chidvilasananda

Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly as all that," Himiko said, elaborating her friend's terrific prophecy; " You won't get a divorce Bird. You'll justify yourself like crazy, and try to salvage your married life by confusing the real issues. A decision like divorce is beyond you now, Bird, the poison has gone to work. And you know how the story ends ? Not even your own wife will trust you absolutely, and one day you'll discover for yourself that your entire private life is in the shadow of deception and in the end you'll destroy yourself. Bird, the first signs of self-destruction have appeared already!"
" But that's a blind alley! Leave it to you to paint the most hopeless future you can think of. " Bird lunged at jocularity ... ~ Kenzaburo Oe

But I'm not imaginative. I couldn't look into the future, like Star Wars or Robots or anything like that. ~ Harry Dean Stanton

Chronocanine Envy:
Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, Life must be lived forward. ~ Douglas Coupland

Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation to man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations: as long as you have not shown it to be "uneconomic" you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper. ~ E.F. Schumacher

Knowing the future is part of that future's past. Perhaps the foreseen happens because we try to change it. ~ Patrick Ness

The future cannot be seen even with the most powerful telescopes. ~ Marty Rubin

The future," she said, her voice echoing over the crowd, "is an ever changing stream. Every choice, every decision we make, sends it down a different path. ~ Julie Kagawa

Sometimes you want to change the past by going from the future in the past. But sometimes you find that everything which you have done, it's not better but it becomes worst but why?
(11.22.63 - Better Check it out!) ~ Deyth Banger

The past is perception. The future is unknown. The only truth is the present. ~ Melissa Heisler

It is the power of visualization that enables us to reach out toward the future, whether our goal is to bring down a mammoth, write a book, or set a new record time in a race. ~ Cameron Stracher

If I do I will secure for you ringside seats." Remus busies himself with looking busy. "Perhaps your future lies in the fine art of divination."
"Now that," Sirius says, "is a flat-out ridiculous waste of time."
"You're only saying that," Remus replies vaguely, "because you only ever see drapery in your crystal ball."
"The professor says they're veils," Sirius mutters. "There's no need to bring that rubbish up again, now is there. ~ Jaida Jones

How simple it is to see that all the worry in the world cannot control the future. How simple it is to see that we can only be happy now. And that there will never be a time when it is not now. ~ Gerald G. Jampolsky

She heard her father's voice as she prepared, remembering all the times she had taken dictation for him, or had overheard him instructing young botanists. 'Be wakeful and watchful,' she heard Henry say. 'Make sure you are not the only member of your party who can write or read a letter. If you need need to find water, follow a dog. If you are starving, eat insects before you waste your energy on hunting. Anything that a bird can eat, you can eat. Your biggest dangers are not snakes, lions, or cannibals; your biggest dangers are blistered feet, carelessness, and fatigue. Be certain to write your diaries and maps legibly; if you die, your notes may be of use to a future explorer. In an emergency, you can always write in blood. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Every product and service is sold on the promise of a better future. The purpose of business is to deliver on the promise, and profit is the reward for doing so. ~ Patrick Dixon

I think books and movies are going to go a long way together in the future. I think we writers are very important material for directors. ~ Tatiana De Rosnay

Let him avoid ,the acquisition of wealth and ,the gratification of his desires, if they are opposed to the sacred law, and even lawful acts which may cause pain in the future or are offensive to men. ~ Guru Nanak

[Our goal] is to help revive America's traditional values: faith, family, neighborhood, work and freedom. Government has no business enforcing these values but neither must it seek, as it did in the recent past, to suppress or replace them. That only robbed us of our tiller and set us adrift. Helping to restore these values will bring new strength, direction and dignity to our lives and to the life of our nation. It's on these values that we'll best build our future. ~ Ronald Reagan

Pfaff: The riposte of a civilized nation: one that believes in good, in human society and does oppose evil, has to be narrowly focused and, above all, intelligent. Missiles are blunt weapons. Those terrorists are smart enough to make others bear the price for what they have done, and to exploit the results. A maddened U.S. response that hurts still others is what they want: It will fuel the hatred that already fires the self-righteousness about their criminal acts against the innocent. What the United States needs is cold reconsideration of how it has arrived at this pass. It needs, even more, to foresee disasters that might lie in the future. ~ Gore Vidal

If we do not stop these mar-makers not,...it will soon be too late. We are the only nation that can halt this crusade. It might be too late in America, but it isn't too late here. Without British support the whole scheme would collapse. For that reason the future of all nations depends upon the policy which is decided in this House. More than that, the final position of Britain in the world is being decided. If we support these anti-Communist crusades through the world as we have supported it in Greece, then our good name and existence will be threatened by the hatred of all free-thinking men. We cannot suppress all desire in Europe and Asia for social change by branding it communism from Russia and persecuting its supporters. Social change doesn't have to come from Russia, whatever the Foreign Office or the Americans say. It is a product of the miserable conditions under which the majority of the earth's population exist. There are fighters for social change in every land, here as well as anywhere.... We Socialists are among them. That is the reason for our predominance in the House to-day. The very men that we try to suppress in other countries are asking for far less liberty than we enjoy here, far less social change than we Socialists hope to initiate in Great Britain. Are we going to betray these men by labelling them Communists and crushing them wherever we find them until we have launched ourselves at Russia herself in a war that will wipe this island off the face of t ~ James Aldridge

The battle fever. He had never thought to experience it himself, though Jamie had told him of it often enough. How time seemed to blur and slow and evenstop, how the past and the future vanished until there was nothing but the instant, how fear fled, and thought fled, and even you body. "You don't feel your wounds then, or the ache in your back from the weight of the armor, or the sweat running down into your eyes. You stop feeling you stop thinking, you stop being you, there is only the fight , the foe, this man and then the next and the next and the next, and you know they are afraid and tired but you're not, you're alive, and death is all around you but their swords move so slowly, you can dance through them laughing." Battle fever. I am half a man and drunk with slaughter, let them kill me if they can! ~ George R R Martin

Certainly–and we can all agree on this, whether we are atheists, theists, panentheists–the future is doing the calling. The unborn children, our great-great-grandchildren are doing the calling. A mere seventy-five years from now they're going to be saying, 'What did you do, Daddy, when the Earth was collapsing and when militarism was where you were putting so much of your money, and when empires were still the mode of the day, and when religions were at each other's throats and Christianity was collapsing? What did you do? How did you interfere and say no? ~ Adam Bucko

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records - on which the entire panic ultimately rested - were systematically "adjusted" to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified. ~ Christopher Booker

No matter what I preach or what we claim to believe in our heads, the future will depend upon our times of prayer. ~ Jim Cymbala

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Children are the seed for peace or violence in the future, depending on how they are cared for and stimulated. Thus, their family and community environment must be sown to grow a fairer and more fraternal world, a world to serve life and hope. ~ Zilda Arns

They think that the past is dead. They don't see that the past is just the beginning of the future. ~ Wen Spencer