Great Throughts Treasury

"In spiritual work, there is no tangible worldly gain to be acquired, but there is instead an inner reward of pleasure, satisfaction, and even joy. Goals replace gains as motives. There is a greater freedom from living on the exciting knife edge of the moment than being a prisoner of the past or having expectations of the future." - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

"If no charismatic emerges, people may be truly bereft and lost in a sea of forces and pressures beyond their adaptive capacity. The society may die. If someone does emerge, the people may understandably attribute his rise to “divine grace.” Indeed, if he exercises leadership, he may well save his community and help it to renew itself. First, he binds people together by powerfully articulating their values, hopes, and pains. Second, he weaves their hopes into some image of the future. And third, he provides energy, strategy, and faith that the vision can be realized." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"The future arrives of its own accord, progress does not." - Poul Henningsen, aka PH

"The greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The cry for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is not cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. He has planted in us the seed of eternal life. The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a here-now." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

"While we're talking, envious time is fleeing: seize the day, put no trust in the future." -

"The doctrine of original sin is a theological perversion of natural fact. It is a fact that all human beings begin life with an equipment of instincts, impulses, and desires, at war with one another and often out of harmony with the realities of eth physical, social, and spiritual world. Sin and the sense of sin will always be with us, to torture and weigh down; but… the religion of the future will try to prevent men’s being afflicted with the sense of sin, rather than encourage it, and then attempt to cure it." - Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley

"The future must have as its basis the consciousness of sanctity in existence – in common things, in the events of human life, in the gradually comprehended interlocking whole revealed to the human desire for knowledge, n the benedictions of beauty and love, in the catharsis, the sacred purging, of the moral drama in which character is pitted against fate and even deepest tragedy may uplift the mind." - Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley

"From your past emerges the present, and from the present is born your future." - Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal

"The future is purchased by the present." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Many live in dread of what is coming. Why should we? The unknown puts adventure into life. It gives us something to sharpen our souls on. The unexpected around the corner gives a sense of anticipation and surprise. Thank God for the unknown future. If we saw all good things which are coming to us, we would sit down and denigrate. If we saw all the evil things, we would be paralyzed. How merciful is God is to lift the curtain on today; and as we get strength today to meet tomorrow, then to lift the curtain on the morrow. He is a considerate God." - E. Stanley Jones, fully Eli Stanley Jones

"God is withdrawn from both ends of time, for his life is not Time but Eternity, the archetype of time. And in eternity there is neither past nor future but only present." -

"Our children may learn about heroes of the past. Our task is to make ourselves architects of the future." - Jomo Kenyatta

"The unhappy person is never present to themself because they always live in the past or the future." -

"Predictions, in themselves, can influence the future." - Andrew Kimbrell

"A lot of the time I'm in the present, and I'm thinking about the past or scheming about the future and missing every present moment, instead of actually partaking of the sacrament of every present moment." -

"Our country demands all our strength, all our energies. To resist the powerful combination now forming against us will require every man at his place. If victorious, we have everything to hope for in the future. If defeated, nothing will be left for us to live for. My whole trust is in God, and I am ready for whatever He may ordain." -

"The struggle of today is not altogether for today – it is for a vast future also." - Abraham Lincoln

"Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past." -

"Business more than any other occupation is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight." - Henry Robinson Luce

"Education is your passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today." -

"With your votes you are working for your future. It is not a holiday; it is the most serious day of work since you were born. Better to come in clothing dirty from work than with your soul filthy from having sold your right to justice." - Luis Muñoz Marín

"I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness." -

"I touch the future: I teach." - Christa McAuliffe

"The future belongs to those who fuse intelligence with faith, and who with courage and determination grope their way forward from chance to choice, from blind adaptation to creative evolution." - Charles Edward Merriam

"Within the child lies the fate of the future." - Maria Montessori

"In the end, we must always return to our beliefs. From the mundane to the mystical, they inform us about reality and they shape our future lives. And if the ultimate reality remains a mystery, so much the better, for it is the questions that give us meaning, that drive us forward and fill us with transcendent awe." - Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman

"Conservation is humanity caring for the future." - Nancy Newhall, fully Nancy Wynne Newhall

"The future influences the present just as much as the past." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The only living life is in the past and future . . . the present is an interlude . . . strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness we are living." -

"If all the records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”… All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”" -

"Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future." - Paul Boese

"The basic function of a myth is always to govern present action towards future hopes." - George Sawyer Pettee

"Life is not completed in a single life span; it cannot but pass on its impulses if the chain of life is traced back into the past, one does not come to a beginning, and if one follows it into the future, one generation follows the next, and no end is ever found." - Tsung Ping or Zong Bing, style name as Zong Shaowen

"The future belongs to those who know how to wait." - Russian Proverbs

"The future is hidden from us, but the past warns us that the world in the end belongs to the unworldly." - Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

"Precisely what we need are good theories to focus our attention, a good set of ideals to guide our action, and good visions of the future to mobilize our energies." - Paul H. Ray

"Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it." -

"Most people think the future is the ends and the present is the means. In fact, the present is the ends and the future the means." - Fritz Jules Roethlisberger

"Eternity is another word for unity. In it, past and future are not apart; here is everywhere, and now goes on forever. The opposite of eternity is diffusion not time. Eternity does not begin when time is at its end. Time is eternity broken into space, like a ray of light refracted in the water… unity is a task, not a condition. The world lies in strife, in discord, in divergence. Unity is beyond not within reality." - Fritz A. Rothschild

"Past and future are what veil God from our sight. Burn up both of them with fire! How long wilt thou be partitioned by these segments as a reed?" - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of 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, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Have you ever considered how dreadful it would be if our lives had no appointed end but went on forever? Can you imagine that as far as the eye can see into the future we should remain enmeshed in all the desires and troubles of this life and that all the ensuing envy, hatred and malice, our own and other people’s should continue to pile up undiminished? If you have ever considered how intolerable the burden of our life would be without the understood certainty that it has an appointed end, you know that death comes to all, even the most fortunate, not as an enemy but as a deliverance." - Albert Schweitzer

"Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones." -

"Prayer is the constant feeling (the recognition) of our infirmity or spiritual poverty, the sanctification of the soul, the foretaste of future blessedness, the angelic bliss, the heavenly rain, refreshing, watering, and fertilizing the ground of the soul, the power and strength of the soul and body, the purifying and freshening of the mental air, the enlightenment of the countenance, the joy of spirit, the golden link, uniting the creature to the Creator." - John Sergieff of Cronstadt, aka Saint John of Kronstadt, born John Iliytch Sergieff

"The future is given shape by our faith, or condemned to drift and disaster by our indifference." - Page Smith, fully Charles Page Smith

"Forget the past, do not try to project yourself into the future for now is the only acceptable time. You are in eternity now." - Baird T. Spalding

"We know of four different languages today where there is not a negative word in the language, there is not a word in the past tense, or a word in the future; tense. All is here and now. Negative words, feelings, conditions have absolutely no power except what we individually give to them. The moment we cease feeding our energy into them they no longer have life, and thus they cease to exist." - Baird T. Spalding

"We are living in a world of fear. The life of man today is corroded and made bitter by fear – fear of the future, fear of the hydrogen bomb, fear of ideologies. Perhaps this fear is a greater danger than the danger itself, because it is fear which drives men to act foolishly, to act thoughtlessly, to act dangerously." - Achmad Sukarno, born Kusno Sosrodihardjo

"If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will hold onto. If you aren't afraid of dying, there is nothing you can't achieve. Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter's place. When you handle the master carpenter's tools chances are that you'll cut your hands." -