Great Throughts Treasury

"If there were no future life, our souls would not thirst for it." -

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." -

"Moral disarmament is to safe-guard the future; material disarmament is to save the present, that there may be a future to safeguard." - Elihu Root

"Humanity goes on and on almost in despair, hoping some time to find rest and peace and fullness of life in the undefined future, when, in fact, all these and more are here now if we would (could?) only reach out our hand and take them." - A. J. S. NULL

"Every man is the architect of his own future (fortune)." - Sallust, full name Carus Valerius Sailustius Crispus NULL

"Self-pity deprives us of the beauty of the past; fear deprives us of the beauty of the future; and jealousy deprives us of the beauty of the moment." - Shantananda Saraswathi, fully Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, born Chandrashekar

"Full of misery is the mind anxious about the future." -

"He that lays down precepts for the governing of our lives, and moderating our passions, obliges humanity not only in the present, but in all future generations." -

"The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go of the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty." -

"The true felicity of life is to be free from anxieties and perturbations; to understand and do our duties to God and man, and to enjoy the present without any serious dependence on the future." -

"That charity alone endures which flows from a sense of duty and a hope in God. this is the charity that treads in secret those paths of misery from which all but the lowest of human wretches have fled; this is that charity which no labor can weary, no ingratitude detach, no horror disgust; that toils, that pardons, that suffers; that is seen by no man, and honored by no man, but, like the great laws of Nature, does the work of God in silence, and looks to a future and better world for its reward." - Sydney Smith

"Whatever may happen in the future, I know that I have learned three things which will remain forever convictions of my heart as well as my mind. Life, even the hardest life, is the most beautiful, wonderful and miraculous treasure in the world. Fulfillment of duty is another beautiful thing, making life happy and giving to the soul an unconquerable force to sustain ideals. This is my second conviction, and my third is that cruelty, hatred, and injustice never can and never will be able to create a mental, moral or material millennium." - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"When no new thoughts fill the mind - when no horizons beckon - when life is in the past, not in the future - you are on the way to uselessness." - Frederick K. Stamm

"We are forced to measure each moment partly in and of itself, for if everything is justified solely by the future, life becomes rather futile." - Malcolm R. Sutherland, Jr.

"Educate your children of self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes from society." - Daniel Webster

"Our whole free dynamic society’s future depends upon a continued growth of our sense of responsibility and morality in direct proportion to the increase in our material wealth." - Walter H. Wheeler, Jr.

"When you make a mistake, don't look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind, and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. the future is yet in your power." - Hugh Lawson White

"Human conduct is ever unreliable until man is anchored in the Divine. Everything in future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now." - Yukteswar, fully Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, born Priyanath Karar NULL

"Greater even than the greatest discovery is to keep open the way to future discovery." - John Jacob Abel

"Every man's life lies within the present; for the past is spent and one with, and the future is uncertain." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

"It is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone. Even this burden, too, can be lessened if you confine it strictly to its own limits." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

"Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

"At any rate it is now quite clear that neither future nor past actually exists. Nor is it right to say that there are times, past, present and future. Perhaps it would be more correct to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future. For these three exist in the mind, and I find them nowhere else: the present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of things future is expectation." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"If we conceive of some point of time which cannot be divided into even the minutes parts of moments, that is the only point that can be called present: and that point flees at such lightning speed from being future to being past, that it has no extent of duration at all." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"The future of society is in the hands of the mothers. If the world was lost through woman, she alone can save it." -

"Our life is always absolute: that’s all there is. The truth is not somewhere else. But we have minds that are trying to burn the past or the future. The living present - Buddhahood - is rarely encountered." - Charlotte Joko Beck

"If I am faithful to the duties of the present, God will provide for the future." - William Bedell

"You define the present in an arbitrary manner as that which is, whereas the present is simply what is being made. Nothing is less than the present moment, if you understand by that the indivisible limit which divides the past from the future. When we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet; and when we think it as existing, it is already past." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

"That God is eternal, is agreed by all who possess reason. What then is eternity?... Eternity is the complete and simultaneous possession of endless life in a single whole... God lives ever in an eternal present, his knowledge transcends all movement of time, and abides in the indivisibility of his present; he grasps the past and the future in all their infinite extent, and with his indivisible cognition he contemplates all events as if they were even now taking place." - Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL

"The future is bound to surprise us, but we don't have to be dumbfounded." - Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding

"When all else is lost, the future still remains." - Christian Nestell Bovee

"Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future." - Jean de La Bruyère

"Children have neither past nor future; and that which seldom happens to us; they rejoice in the present." - Jean de La Bruyère

"As we age, the mystery of Time more and more dominates the mind. We live less in the present, which no longer has the solidity that it had in youth; less in the future, for the future every day narrows its span. The abiding things lie in the past." -

"One faces the future with one's past." - Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment." -

"There is a time in the lives of most of us when, despondent of all joy in an earthly future, and tortured by conflicts between inclination and duty, we transfer all the passion and fervor of our troubled souls to enthusiastic yearnings for the divine love, looking to its mercy, and taking thence the only hopes that can cheer - the only strength that can sustain us." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"What is past is past. There is a future left to all men who have the virtue to repent, and the energy to atone." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"It doth not yet appear what we shall be. We lie here in our nest, unfledged and weak, guessing dimly at our future, and scarce believing what even now appears. But the power is in us, and that power is finally to be revealed. And what a revelation will that be!" - Horace Bushnell

"The best prophet of the future is the past." -

"We live in the present, we dream of the future, but we learn eternal truths from the past." -

"We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell. To live in the future is a contradiction in terms. The future is dead, in the perfectly definite sense it is not alive." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

"All wisdom is not new wisdom, and the past should be studied if the future is to be successfully encountered." -

"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." -

"Faith makes the discords of the present the harmonies of the future." - Robert Collyer

"If man can, with almost complete assurance, predict phenomena when he knows their laws, and if, even when he does not, he can still, with great expectation of success, forecast the future on the basis of his experience of the past, why, then, should it be regarded as a fantastic undertaking to sketch, with some pretense to truth, the future destiny of man on the basis of his history?" -

"The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future." - Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski

"Why fear tomorrow, timid heart? Why tread the future's way? We only need to do our part Today, dear child, today. The past is written! Close the book On pages sad and gay; Within the future do not look, But live today-today. "Tis this one hour that God has given; His now we must obey; And it will make our earth his heaven To live today-today." - Lydia Avery Coonley Ward

"One sees the past better than it was; one finds the present worse than it is; one hopes for a future happier than it will be." - Madame d'Épinay, born born Florence Louise Tardieu d'Esclavelles Petronilla

"The single greatest power in the world today is the power to change... The most recklessly irresponsible thing we could do in the future would be to go on exactly as we have in the past ten or twenty years. I can imagine no more dangerous policy than the conservatism that exists today." - Karl Deutsch, fully Karl Wolfgang Deutsch