Quotes about Future

"I am motivated simply by my awareness of the impact today's actions have on tomorrow's circumstances."

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength (and joy).

I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean?
It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.

The illusion
     that there will be some time in the future
           when all things will come together for us
                  interferes with our fully living today.
If we aren't living fully now,
      we never will.
The only time we ever have
      is the present.

Infuse your life with action. Don't wait for it to happen. Make it happen. Make your own future. Make your own hope. Make your own love. And whatever your beliefs, honor your creator, not by passively waiting for grace to come down from upon high, but by doing what you can to make grace happen... yourself, right now, right down here on Earth.

In God's wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.

That's the thing about some librarians - they love telling you a look is out of print, borrowed, lost, or not even written yet.
I have a list of titles that I leave at the desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.

There is a catalogue of private acts which you harbour inviolable and do not speak about. Hold it whole in your head and consider what everyone you know is doing right now. Small isolated things which your imagining rescues from the silence of privacy. A social encyclopedia of the present tense. Somewhere the personality slips its leash and disappears over the back fence leaving nothing ferocious to fight off the throng of details that rushes into your brain. You become a society, a public resource, a random dictionary of ephemera. And love is the force which allows you to speak in the midst of all this negative capability and which keeps you away from madness and inside a body with a future.

Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.

Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light.

Humanity is looking for a new story. The one it has embraced since the Renaissance is no longer viable. Despite all of its positive contributions to modern life, three hundred years of scientific-technological development has left our civilization in an untenable position--at odds with its natural environment and ultimately its own deeper, collective, soul. Only a global shift in fundamental perceptions, values, and corresponding actions will allow human-kind to resume an evolutionary pat in alignment with nature and the larger cosmos.

To embody a new paradigm of civilization - to learn to think like a planet in order to heal and nurture a planet - is not a typical hero's task.  It is more the task of a gardener.  The planet does not offer us challenges to be overcome to prove our worth or individuality; it presents us with a community to understand, a community with disparate needs and identities that are nonetheless intertwined in mutual dependencies.

Where are you making for?  This is the question of our time. What is our vision?  What kind of world do we want, for ourselves, for our children, for our children's children?  What kind of world do we want for the fish and the birds, the beasts and the insects, the forests and the meadows, the crops that feed us and the flowers that bring us beauty?  I believe we want to create a world large enough to be a soul home for us and for all beings, loving and large enough to give expression to the soul of the world itself, spacious and whole enough to express the lengths of God.  And I believe we can.  The capacity to do so is innate in us.  If affairs are soul size, we can meet them because we are soul size, too.

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.

Fast drivers can see no further than slow drivers, but they must look further down the road to time their reactions safely. Similarly, people with great projects afoot habitually look further and more clearly into the future than people who are mired in day-to-day concerns.

Only one thing makes a dream impossible: the fear of failure.

To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you?

Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.

If I say, if I talk about, 'I want to be enlightened...' it implies a future. And there isn't any.

In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future. 

The following has been revealed to me: This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end. It is merely the end of the beginning. Something big is coming but it is not the end. It is merely another in a series of transitions humanity has and will continue to face.

They make a secret pact with themelves never to think about the future.

To attain peace among the nations in any dynamic or enduring form requires not simply political negotiation but a new mode of consciousness. The magnitude of this change is in the order of religious conversion or of spiritual rebirth rather than of treaty processes or even of inter-cultural understanding. Simply to recognize the basic nature and dimension of the issues we face is already an advance. But if a peaceful world is beyond politics it is also beyond religions as these presently exist. A change is needed in every phase of human life. This lies mainly in recognition that the micro phase, the particular or national traditions, must find their context and fulfillment in the macro phase, the global or panhuman phase of human existence. The future rests in the religious, political, economic and cultural capacity of humans to establish this larger context in which the particular traditions will find both support and fulfillment in a functional global community.

The basic mood of the future might well be one of confidence in the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the Earth. If the dynamics of the Universe from the beginning shaped the course of the heavens, lighted the Sun, and formed the Earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought into being the unnumbered variety of living beings, and finally brought us into being and guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the Universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture.

Surround yourself with people whose lives work in every important way, and you will become one of them.

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.  There is no time in them.  There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.  Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less.  Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike.  But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.  He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present above time.

Creating perfection will also create expectations for the future

Past is past and we must live the present to survive the future.

These tenses--past, present and future--are not the tenses of time; they are tenses of the mind. That which is no longer before the mind becomes the past. That which is before the mind is the present. And that which is going to be before the mind is the future. Past is that which is no longer before you. Future is that which is not yet before you. And present is that which is before you and is slipping out of your sight. Soon it will be past....

The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.