Quotes & Sayings About Looking Into The Future

It remains to be asked why today it is the image of the woman of the "Golden Age" [the Abbasid dynasty] - a "slave" who intrigues in the corridors of power when she loses hope of seducing - who symbolizes the Muslim eternal female, while the memory of Umm Salama, A'isha, and Sukayna awakens no response and seems strangely distant and unreal.
The answer without doubt is to be found in the time-mirror wherein the Muslim looks at himself to foresee his future. The image of "his" woman will change when he feels the pressing need to root his future in a liberating memory. Perhaps the woman should help him do this through daily pressure for equality, thereby bringing him into a fabulous present. And the present is always fabulous, because there everything is possible - even the end of always looking to the past and the beginning of confidence, of enjoying in harmony the moment that we have. — Fatema Mernissi

The Pentagon has been looking into the possibility of developing "smart dust," dust-sized particles that have tiny sensors inside that can be sprayed over a battlefield to give commanders real-time information. In the future it is conceivable that "smart dust" might be sent to the nearby stars. — Michio Kaku

I was ten when I heard the music that ended the first phase of my life and cast me hurtling into a new horizon. Drenched to the skin, I stood on Dunoon's pier peering seawards through diagonal rain, looking for the ferry that would take me home. There, on the everwet west coast of Scotland, I heard it: like sonic scalpels, the sounds of electric guitars sliced through the dreich weather. My body hairs pricked up, each one a willing receiver for the Thunder-God grooves. To my young ears, the sound of these amplified guitars was angelic (although, with hindsight, I don't suppose angels play Gibson guitars at ear-bleeding volume). A voice that suggested vocal chords of polished silver soared alongside razor-sharp overdriven riffs. I knew that I was hearing the future. — Mark Rice

We frequently look into the future of mankind and see dangers. We see if we carry on doing what we are doing in 20 years' time there will be no rainforests left, just to use one example. Looking into the future may be one of the reasons that brains evolved in the first place. — Richard Dawkins

We're not very good as a species at looking into the future. It's much easier to look back at the past. We can edit out the bits we don't like, reinvent ourselves. But there's nothing about the future we can edit or reinvent. Most people are prisoners of the future just as much as they are prisoners of their genes. — Peter James

After spending most of her life scanning the horizon for slights and threats, genuine and imagined, she knew the real threat to her happiness came not from the dot in the distance, but from looking for it. Expecting it. Waiting for it. And in some cases, creating it. Her father had jokingly accused her of living in the wreckage of her future. Until one day she'd looked deep into his eyes and saw he wasn't joking. He was warning her. — Louise Penny

The thing about rowing, you face backward. Always looking into the past, never the future. Always seeing what you're losing, never what you've got to gain. — Joe Abercrombie

A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. — Walter Benjamin

Looking ahead to future applications of electronics, [de Forest] grew even gloomier. He believed that 'electron physiologists' would eventually be able to monitor and analyze 'thought or brain waves', allowing 'joy and grief to be measured in define, quantitative unit.' Ultimately, he concluded, 'a professor may be able to implant knowledge into the reluctant brains of his 22nd century pupils. What terrifying political possibilities may be lurking there! Let us be thankful that such things are only for posterity, not for us. — Nicholas Carr

God is not going to let you see the distant scene either. So you might as well quit looking for it. He promises a lamp unto our feet, not a crystal ball into the future (Psalm 119:105). We do not need to know what will happen tomorrow. We only need to know he leads us and "we will find grace to help us when we need it" (Hebrews 4:16 NLT). — Max Lucado

Looking at the sky last night and the moon in the first fresh dark, just a few stars, bright with their cold flares, I had a little crumpled thought, 'Oh well, the moon. It's just another place like California.' One's imagination drags its feet as we are inexorably hauled into the future. — James Schuyler

Sometimes things happen in our lives that wake us up to the truth, about how short life is. It's then we wonder why we spent so much wasted time looking too far into the future. — Ron Baratono

Well, look at the other characters in Winnie the Pooh. They all actually demonstrate that Pooh is the most mentally balanced. There's Tigger, I mean, that tiger just can't stay in the moment and enjoy it. He's too much of a hedonist; he always wants the next adventure. That's not healthy, he'll burn out." I started properly laughing. "And what about Eeyore?" "Well he's a depressive, isn't he? If Eeyore walked into my doctor's office he'd be prescribed with a lifetime supply of antidepressants. And not just because US doctors dole them out like candy canes at Christmas." The music stopped and I found myself clapping without even looking. "But Pooh?" "Pooh lives in the moment. He doesn't fret about the past, or freak about the future. He's an expert at mindfulness." Kyle — Holly Bourne

It is enough to have been created, to have embodied for a moment the infinite and tumultuously creative spirit. It is infinitely more than enough to have been used, to have been the rough sketch for some perfected creation. Looking into the future, I saw without sorrow, rather with quiet interest, my own decline and fall. — Olaf Stapledon

Just looking at them I grow greedy, as if they were freshly baked loaves waiting on their shelves to be broken open
that one and that
and I make my choice in a mood of exalted luck, browsing among them like a cow in sweetest pasture. For life is continuous as long as they wait to be read
these inked paths opening into the future, page after page, every book its own receding horizon. And I hold them, one in each hand, a curious ballast weighing me here to earth. — Linda Pastan

Children of India, I am here to speak to you to-day about some practical things, and my object in reminding you about the glories of the past is simply this. Many times have I been told that looking into the past only degenerates and leads to nothing, and that we should look to the future. That is true. But out of the past is built the future. Look back, therefore, as far as you can, drink deep of the eternal fountains that are behind, and after that, look forward, march forward, and make India brighter, greater, much higher than she ever was. Our ancestors were great. We must recall that. We must learn the elements of our being, the blood that courses in our veins; we must have faith in that blood, and what it did in the past: and out of that faith, and consciousness of past greatness, we must build an India yet greater than what she has been. And — Annie Besant

Stop thinking. Son't hesitate. Act. The mantra has served her tolerably so far. Looking into the future would improvise her if she allowed it. — Stephen Lloyd Jones

After all, looking around, we see bodies, not naked genes. Bodies, bodies everywhere: eating, sleeping, being eaten, growing, reproducing, laughing, lounging, walking, running, swimming, hopping and slithering their way to...what? To either success or failure, as measured by how well they project their component genes into the future. — Nanelle Barash

Don't walk into the future looking backwards — Stevanne Auerbach

When you focus upon lack in an attitude of complaining, you establish a vibrational point of attraction that then gives you access only to more thoughts of complaint. Your deliberate effort to tell a new story will establish a new pattern of thought, providing you with a new point of attraction from your present, about your past, and into your future. The simple effort of looking for positive aspects will set a new vibrational tone that will begin the immediate attraction of thoughts, people, circumstances, and things that are pleasing to you. — Esther Hicks

To look into the mirror is to see the future, in blood and rubies. — Gregory Maguire

Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can. — Charles Handy

There comes a moment in life when one must acknowledge that you just can't keep looking back into your past for reasons to keep someone in your present and future. Regardless of how much looking that cruel reality in the eye hurts ... memories can't be enough. — Eiry Nieves

Child, looking through bubbles into the future; now those bright bubbles were all behind him. Once more he had — Hans Christian Andersen

To commit to the present moment is to accept our inability to control the future and accept that many of our fears and reactions are just what they are, thoughts and emotions that are irrationally internalized. We will never be completely void of the temptations to look into the future when we are in the present; however, one must come to the understanding that by looking too far off into the future, we taint the future by creating an artificial expectation of what the future should hold, and are emotionally drained when it holds something else. Focus on the present, and you will come to have more control over the future naturally. — Forrest Curran

I have always stressed to my girls that outer beauty fades but inner beauty lasts forever. Simple things like smiling and looking people in the eye could change someone's bad day into a good one. My mom always said that beauty is as beauty does, and I'm sure it will pass along to all the future generations of our family. — Tina Knowles

If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe as we spread into space. If we are the only intellegent beings in the galaxy we should make sure we survive and continue ... Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space. We have maderemarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space. — Stephen Hawking

Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw Jace shoot her a look of white rage - but when she glanced at him, he looked as he always did: easy, confident, slightly bored.
"In future, Clarissa," he said, "it might be wise to mention that you already have a man in your bed, to avoid such tedious situations."
"You invited him into bed?" Simon demanded, looking shaken.
"Ridiculous, isn't it?" said Jace. "We would never have all fit."
"I didn't invite him into bed," Clary snapped. "We were just kissing."
"Just kissing?" Jace's tone mocked her with its false hurt. "How swiftly you dismiss our love. — Cassandra Clare

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

The children are our future. And that is why, ultimately, we're screwed unless we do something about it. If you haven't noticed, the children who are our future are good-looking, but they aren't all that bright. As dense as they might be, they will eventually notice that adults have spent all the money, spread disease, and turned the planet into a smoky, filthy ball of death. We're raising an entire generation of dumb, pissed-off kids who know where the handguns are kept. This is not a good recipe for a happy future. — Scott Adams

In the course of our Journey we need to realize that we do not need to become anything, because we are already in possession of the characteristics that we have been looking for so far, pursuing an image projected into the future. — Frank M. Wanderer

Love for her threatened to overwhelm me. I set down all my bags and drew her into my arms. That silly mug suddenly took on monumental significance, and looking down at her, at the face I loved so much, I could see the future she described, a future together where we could accomplish anything. — Richelle Mead

He'd built his life on wanting the impossible - true power, recognition, a future - and now magic had found him the moment he stopped looking. It breathed life into all those old dreams, filling him with that most terrible of questions:
What if . . . — Roshani Chokshi

I've gotten used to not looking too far into the future; it's best when you can begin each day anew. — Anton Corbijn

You can't drive into the future if you are looking into a rear vision mirror. — Catherine DeVrye

We can continue to try and clean up the gutters all over the world and spend all of our resources looking at just the dirty spots and trying to make them clean. Or we can lift our eyes up and look into the skies and move forward in an evolutionary way. — Buzz Aldrin

Past, present, and future, the symbiosis of our lives," the old man continued quietly, gently. "Our birth, our life, our death, all tied into a single package that we spend our time on this earth unwrapping. Sometimes we see clearly what it is we are looking at. Sometimes we do not. Sometimes things happen to distract or deceive us, and we must look more carefully at what it is we hold. — Terry Brooks

Looking at him, she saw her future and felt all the ragged tears in her heart heal themselves. "I fit," she whispered in marvel, stepping into him. "I fit with you."
He nodded and wrapped his arms around her.
"Perfectly — Jill Shalvis

Your past is handing you a tool you can use to leap into your future: the crucible moments from your own life. The power you need is in looking back to look forward. — Bill Jensen

I'd like to get shot into space. I'd like to potentially visit the moon. I don't know if I can do that in the next couple years, but I spent some time at the jet propulsion lab, looking out at the future of when a guy like me can do a little space travel. — Rob Dyrdek

Thoughts are such fleet magic things. Betsy's thoughts swept a wide arc while Uncle Keith read her poem aloud. She thought of Julia learning to sing with Mrs. Poppy. She thought of Tib learning to dance. She thought of herself and Tacy and Tib going into their 'teens. She even thought of Tom and Herbert and of how, by and by, they would be carrying her books and Tacy's and Tib's up the hill from high school. — Maud Hart Lovelace

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information. — Jorge Luis Borges

I'm sure that was the right step, even though, formally speaking, it may seem disadvantageous for a president to resign. But, looking into what is happening today and what is going to happen in the future, I think history will show I made the right decision. — Eduard Shevardnadze

Voters who throw their emotional weight into elections they know deep down inside won't produce real change in their lives are also indulging in a kind of fantasy. That's why voters still dream of politicians whose primary goal is to effectively govern and maintain a thriving first world society with great international ambitions. What voters don't realize, or don't want to realize, is that that dream was abandoned long ago by this country's leaders, who know the more prosaic reality and are looking beyond the fantasy, into the future, at an America plummeted into third world status. — Matt Taibbi

To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the future. The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about the past or worries about the future. If you are firmly grounded in the present moment, the past can be an object of inquiry, the object of your mindfulness and concentration. You can attain many insights by looking into the past. But you are still grounded in the present moment. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Miss Celia stares down into the pot like she's looking for her future. "Are you happy, Minny?"
"Why you ask me funny questions like that?"
"But are you?"
"Course I's happy. You happy too. Big house, big yard, husband looking after you." I frown at Miss Celia and I make sure she can see it. Because ain't that white people for you, wondering if they are happy ENOUGH. — Kathryn Stockett

Walks are never as good during the day. At night, when everyone's apartments are lit up and you can see inside, that's where the action is. Everything about this fascinates me. Windows, lampposts, building facades. Looking into other people's lives. The way it all comes together, this entity greater than the sum of its parts. I feel inspired. I'm excited about my future life. — Susane Colasanti

The Buddha said that we should not be afraid of the past; but he did warn us not to lose ourselves in it, either. We should not feed our regret or pain over the past, and we should not get carried away by the past. We do need to study and understand the past, however, because by looking deeply into the past we learn a lot of things that can benefit the present and the future. The past is an object of our study, of our meditation, but the way to study it or meditate on it is by remaining anchored in the present moment. We — Thich Nhat Hanh

Necessities
1
A map of the world. Not the one in the atlas,
but the one in our heads, the one we keep coloring in.
With the blue thread of the river by which we grew up.
The green smear of the woods we first made love in.
The yellow city we thought was our future.
The red highways not traveled, the green ones
with their missed exits, the black side roads
which took us where we had not meant to go.
The high peaks, recorded by relatives,
though we prefer certain unmarked elevations,
the private alps no one knows we have climbed.
The careful boundaries we draw and erase.
And always, around the edges,
the opaque wash of blue, concealing
the drop-off they have stepped into before us,
singly, mapless, not looking back. — Lisel Mueller

Why does it often take extreme life situations to bring back an awareness of the magic and mystery of life? Why do we often wait until we're about to die before discovering a deep gratitude for life as it is? Why do we exhaust ourselves seeking love, acceptance, fame, success, or spiritual enlightenment in the future? Why do we work or meditate ourselves into the grave? Why do we postpone life? Why do we hold back from it? What are we looking for exactly? What are we waiting for? What are we afraid of? Will the life we long for really come in the future? Or is it always closer than that? — Jeff Foster

And I knew the point of love right then.
The point of love was to help you survive.
The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living. The meaning was to hold the hand of someone you cared about and to live inside the present. Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. — Matt Haig

Leaning against my car after changing the oil,
I hold my black hands out and stare into them
as if they were the faces of my children looking
at the winter moon and thinking of the snow
that will erase everything before they wake.
In the garage, my wife comes behind me
and slides her hands beneath my soiled shirt.
Pressing her face between my shoulder blades,
she mumbles something, and soon we are laughing,
wrestling like children among piles of old rags,
towels that unravel endlessly, torn sheets,
work shirts from twenty years ago when I stood
in the door of a machine shop, grease blackened,
and Kansas lay before me blazing with new snow,
a future of flat land, white skies, and sunlight.
After making love, we lie on the abandoned
mattress and stare at our pale winter bodies
sprawling in the half-light. She touches her belly,
the scar of our last child, and the black prints
of my hand along her hips and thighs. — B.H. Fairchild

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.

The past is gone and the future is still to happen. Only the present moment is real. I believe we all know this very well. As for me, I have been practising the art of being in the here and now for three decades. I have used many techniques aimed at focusing the attention on the present, while releasing attachment to past and future. There are also many courses and workshops on the topic. And I can provide details, if you are interested. Yet, I warn you, learning to be in the present requires lots of hard work, time and money. Yet there is one circumstance when results are immediate, with no effort and also free of charge. This is when both looking ahead or backwards is so painful and horrible, that the only option is looking straight into the present. Hence, if it is the case for you now, rejoice, this may be your greatest chance, and you are in good company! — Franco Santoro

We are always looking into the future, but we see only the past. — Sophie Swetchine

After all, the future is quite meaningless and unimportant unless, sooner or later, it is going to become the present. Thus to plan for a future which is not going to become present is hardly more absurd than to plan for a future which, when it comes to me, will find me "absent," looking fixedly over its shoulder instead of into its face. — Anonymous

Looking in those eyes I had grown to like so well - the eyes I trusted implicitly but could make my stomach writhe with pleasure - I felt a twinge of sadness that there was nothing in the future to suggest we might ever be a normal couple.

"If we don't make it out alive -"

His shook his head once. "We will."

I continued, more quickly this time. "If we don't -"

"Especially if we don't," he finished, pulling me into him. My lips met his - this time unsurprised. This time, I wanted it desperately. — Tarah Benner

He's rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he'll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums - hers alone - is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future. — Jennifer Egan

I feel that you are justified in looking into the future with true assurance, because you have a mode of living in which we find the joy of life and the joy of work harmoniously combined. Added to this is the spirit of ambition which pervades your very being, and seems to make the day's work like a happy child at play. — Albert Einstein

The future is in your hands, she resumed. She held her own hands out to us, the ancient gesture that was both an offering and an invitation, to come forward, into an embrace, an acceptance. In your hands, she said, looking down at her own hands as if they had given her the idea. But there was nothing in them. They were empty. It was our hands that were supposed to be full, full of the future; which could be held but not seen. — Margaret Atwood

It doesn't help anyone to judge their happiness or career by looking at where others may or may not be. Dad said it best: 'All the time you're looking left and right at other people, you're neglecting what's in front of you.If you focus on looking straight ahead, you can take the odd glance at the future.' He's got a way of saying things sometimes that just puts everything into perspective. — James Corden

Live in the moment, day by day, and don't stress about the future. People are so caught up in looking into the future, that they kind of lose what's in front of them. — Jenna Ushkowitz

Ego is the central figure of our personal history, based upon the past and looking into the future. Ego is the deepest dream of the Consciousness. — Frank M. Wanderer

Out of past experience it flows into the present quality of the human soul and out of this into deed and their effects, and from these on into the future. What if this future will at some time be the past? How if the deeds performed are also, further on ahead, to remain bound up with the Ego? Might not the Ego which was over-looking, guarding and guiding the whole of the stream's course, determine that from all this, in the far future, new experiences should develop? — Hermann Poppelbaum

He knew he would always remember her, standing there with that expectant, forward-looking smile, enough to turn the future into summer. — Willa Cather

Her eyes weren't blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still with the void in which the sum of everything they'd ever said or done, every pain they'd inflicted, every joy they'd shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind. — Jonathan Franzen