Quotes & Sayings About Looking Ahead In Life

Optimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God, as when the Anglican burial service inters the corpse 'in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God's own commitment, that the best is yet to come. — J.I. Packer

The melancholic breeze of another morning caressing senses tired of a brief life, yet longing for more. But my Lord, who knows the moments next, who sees the path ahead, who decides a life as delicate as a dew drop upon the tip of a grass that sways looking at the beauty of the skies? — Preeth Nambiar

I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can't see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story. — Donald Miller

Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his 'memories' is like meeting a man on a train who says, 'Don't look at me; that's misleading. If you want to know what I'm like, wait until we're in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in the window.' You wait, and look, and catch a face against a shifting background of sooty walls, cables, and sudden brickwork. The transparent shape flickers and jumps, always a few feet away. You become accustomed to its existence, you move with its movements; and though you know its presence is conditional, you feel it to be permanent. Then there is a wail from ahead, a roar and a burst of light; the face is gone for ever. — Julian Barnes

The next time you get into your car, notice the size of the front windscreen, compared to the size of the rear view mirror. This is because what is up ahead is more important than what you have already passed. Where you are going is far more important than where you have been. If you let your thoughts dwell in the past, then you will get stuck in the past, and when looking back, you cannot see where you are going and can easily lose your way. Don't let one setback ruin your life. Don't let losing that job, that relationship, that house define who you are. Each step on the journey is simply another step on the road to your divine destiny. — Rev. J Martin

But back then, back on Lispenard Street, I didn't know so much of this. Then, we were only standing and looking up at that red-brick building, and I was pretending that I never had to fear for him, and he was letting me pretend this: that all the dangerous things he could have done, all the ways he could have broken my heart, were in the past, the stuff of stories, that the time that lay behind us was scary, but the time that lay ahead of us was not. — Hanya Yanagihara

The moral of the story is even though that seemed like the end of the world back then, right now I can look back on it and laugh. And if anyone is going through something similar right now just know it will get better. — Phil Lester

Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow imagined his younger self standing down the timeline of his present life, bare toes curling in teenage beach sand, looking ahead to today and watching his future life collapse in on itself like a dying star. His future life becoming small and dark and dense, its gravity apparently grim and inescapable.
Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow spent some cash on a bottle of vodka and drank it at home within an hour. — Warren Ellis

I do not like to dwell on the past. Life is ahead of us. If we spend too much time looking backward, we can't see where we are going! — R.J. Palacio

Mom's Rules for Life in New York City
1. Always have your key out before you reach the front door.
2. If a stranger is hanging out in front of the building, don't ever go in - just keep walking around the block until he's gone.
3. Look ahead. If there's someone acting strange down the block, looking drunk or dangerous, cross to the other side of the street, but don't be obvious about it. Make it look like you were planning to cross the street all along.
4. Never show your money on the street. — Rebecca Stead

It's fun to think about what kind of car you want to have. You compare specifications and customize everything your way. More importantly than the type of vehicle you want to get, is where you want to go with it. Where will this car take you if you were to have it today. Perhaps it's already yours. Now where will you drive tomorrow, next month, next year, for the rest of your life? Make your journey memorable by looking ahead into the distance. The distance is where we find our ultimate destination. — J.R. Rim

Leave it all on the track. Live with no regrets. Spend less time looking in life's rearview mirror and more time looking ahead at the road stretched before us and the opportunities that await. Why not, indeed? — Mike Dellosso

if you motherfuckers must know, I was looking up porn," Preppy said with a shrug of his shoulders. There was a rustling in the brush up ahead. A huge brown hog with wiry hair and a broken tusk darted out from its hiding place and into the clearing, making a run for his life through the trees. Preppy lifted his gun and pulled the trigger. He missed the fast moving pig and the bullet blew a huge hole into a tree stump. "But you'd be surprised how one little misspelling of the word BEASTIALITY can change the entire fucking nature of a search. — T.M. Frazier

Each day we have to decide to choose to have an awesome life. We are responsible for our own fate and cannot blame circumstances for our failures. It is in our own best interest to make choices that are going to create the life we desire and be accountable for our failure to make such good choices. Today is a present so do not squander your time looking into the past. Life is about the journey so press ahead by always looking forward to the next opportunity to succeed. — Don A. Holbrook

Everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God's glorious standard. 24Yet God freely and graciously declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. 25For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood. This sacrifice shows that God was being fair when he held back and did not punish those who sinned in times past, 26for he was looking ahead and including them in what he would do in this present time. God did this to demonstrate his righteousness, for he himself is fair and just, and he declares sinners to be right in his sight when they believe in Jesus. — Anonymous

You can spend your life looking over your shoulder or you can look ahead. I choose to look ahead — Pleasant Rowland

Thinking more than a move ahead never got me anywhere in life. Only in chess. And even then it was sometimes a burden. I saw fifteen moves ahead once, in Norway, but there was a much easier path to victory, and I missed it. Looking into the future too hard, I've found can be paralyzing. — Jennifer DuBois

Life keeps going. You think it'll stop, wait for you to be done crying, but it just keeps moving. Don't spend your time looking back. You don't want to miss what's ahead. — Kristin Hannah

It isn't good to hold on too hard to the past. You can't spend your whole life looking back. Not even when you can't see what lies ahead. All you can do is keep on keeping on, and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should be - even if it isn't what you expected. — Jim Butcher

Look ahead, because life is before you, not behind you, or else you stumble! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Looking ahead, I believe that the underlying importance of higher education, of science, of technology, of research and scholarship to our quality of life, to the strength of our economy, to our security in many dimensions will continue to be the most important message. — Charles Vest

It's important to keep your options open.It's important to live and not get s hung up on the past.The past is called the past for a reason.If you are constantly looking behind you, your eyes aren't on the road ahead.You don't drive a car that way, so why would you live your life that way?. — Rachel Van Dyken

Most firms are looking for people who will stay up until three A.M. seven nights a week making slides for a partner who goes home to Wellesley for dinner every night at five P.M. - and who will do so thinking that they're 'winning.' Look at it this way: most firms assume that you'll leave for law school or business school within three years, and they invest in your training accordingly. Quality mentoring when you're young is worth whatever you pay for it. Sometimes that means less money, sometimes that means less of a life beyond work. But quality mentoring is not going to be delivered by someone who is twenty-six, and just one tidal cycle ahead of you. — Marina Keegan

There'll be moments in life, sweet pea, that stand out in your memories like a photograph. Scenes captured perfectly in your mind, frozen in time with each detail as colorful as it was that first time you saw it. 'Flashbulb memories,' some people call them," she'd told me, her eyes crinkling up and nearly disappearing in a face etched with too many laugh lines to count. "Most people don't recognize those moments as they happen. They look back fifty years later, and realize that those were the most important parts of their entire life. But at the time, they're so busy looking ahead to what's coming down the line or worrying about their future, they don't enjoy their present. Don't be like them, sweet pea. Don't get so caught up in chasing your dreams that you forget to live them. — Julie Johnson

You can almost measure where you are in life by the degree to which you have begun looking back rather than ahead. — Ted Koppel

Stop looking backward. Life isn't lived in that direction. Your future isn't in that direction. It's forward, out into the horizon ahead of you. — F.E. Feeley Jr.

I don't know why, but I suddenly felt a long way away from everybody I had known and loved when I was a girl. I missed people. For a minute I stood there and wished I could get back to that time. Then with my next thought I understood clearly that I couldn't do that. No. But it came to me then that my life did not remotely resemble the life I thought I'd have when I had been young and looking ahead to things. — Raymond Carver

Oh, you know me, Jules," she answered. "I do not like to dwell on the past. Life is ahead of us. If we spend too much time looking backward, we can't see where we are going!" Much — R.J. Palacio

The past is called the past for a reason. If you are constantly looking behind you, your eyes aren't on the road ahead. You don't drive the car that way, so why should you live your life that way? — Rachel Van Dyken

We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down. — Margaret Atwood

John felt grounded again. He remembered his favorite Bible story, the one about Peter getting out of the boat and walking on water. The big fisherman was walking along quite nicely until he looked at the waves and began to sink. As much as possible, John tried to live his life without looking at the waves. But when he did, when the lives of his grown children caused his faith to waver even a little, God always sent someone to illustrate the words of Christ: "You of little faith . . . why did you doubt?" John felt certain that in this, his most trying season yet, the Lord had sent Pastor Mark to fill that role. It was a certainty that kept his eyes where they belonged - off the waves and straight ahead to the outstretched arms of Jesus. — Karen Kingsbury

You know, there was a time when childbirth was possibly the most terrifying thing you could do in your life, and you were literally looking death in the face when you went ahead with it. And so this is a kind of flashback to a time when that's what every woman went through. Not that they got ripped apart, but they had no guarantees about whether they were going to live through it or not.
You know, I recently read - and I don't read nonfiction, generally - Becoming Jane Austen. That's the one subject that would get me to go out and read nonfiction. And the author's conclusion was that one of the reason's Jane Austen might not have married when she did have the opportunity ... well, she watched her very dear nieces and friends die in childbirth! And it was like a death sentence: You get married and you will have children. You have children and you will die. (Laughs) I mean, it was a terrifying world. — Stephenie Meyer

When I'm travelling, I feel like the secret to my life, to myself, to really becoming, is one step ahead. It's in the next destination, the next town I get lost in, the next stranger I talk to. It's always next but never here ...
I like having hope. And I hope I find what I'm looking for before I have to leave. — Karina Halle

The hallway felt like time itself, and Patricia Buckingham and I were standing at opposite ends-her looking back on all she'd seen, me wondering what lay ahead. — Ally Carter

Sometimes things feel hopeless. Not always within my own life - but looking outward, it seems like rough times lie ahead of us. The world seems to be kind of caving in on itself in a lot of ways. But I try to look on the bright side. — Jenny Lewis

Turned and ran down another. They remembered the corridors that held no cheese and quickly went into new areas. Sniff would smell out the general direction of the cheese, using his great nose, and Scurry would race ahead. They got lost, as you might expect, went off in the wrong direction and often bumped into walls. But after a while, they found their way. Like the mice, the two Littlepeople, Hem and Haw, also used their ability to think and learn from their past experiences. However, they relied on their complex brains to develop more sophisticated methods of finding Cheese. Sometimes they did well, but at other times their powerful human beliefs and emotions took over and clouded the way they looked at things. It made life in the Maze more complicated and challenging. Nonetheless, Sniff, Scurry, Hem and Haw all discovered, in their own way, what they were looking for. They each found their own kind of cheese one day at the end of one of the corridors in Cheese Station — Spencer Johnson