Quotes & Sayings About Looking Into Your Future

If healing is the closest form of the already-ness of the coming of the kingdom of God, and if help moves farther down the spectrum toward the not-yet-ness of the kingdom of God, then hope points us most clearly to the ultimate consummation of the kingdom of God in the future. Healing implies reversal, help implies assistance, and hope implies reminding. Remember that the coming of the kingdom is also a future event. It is the looking forward to the consummation of all things. When healing is not in the will of God's providence, and help is not enough-and it never will be in this lifetime-then hope is always a present reality. — Stephanie O. Hubach

People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
...
She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort. — Wallace Stegner

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

Actually, we chose the name Sun Cellular because we believe the name 'Sun' is bright, forward-looking and optimistic. It is my sincere hope that the whole Philippines will share our positive outlook, optimism and faith in the country's future. — John Gokongwei

For, I think, when I woke up today, with a dream of yesterday still in my eyes,I felt tired in life. And thinking of the little blond girl of Mays & Junes long gone by,I felt strange looking on a field of wheat, and I thought, in a moment I was God and so was she, and this field was us too. So long gone, she goes. But I am still her, whether she comes and goes like all of life, or she stays awhile.
Once, a man of physics told me, matter cannot be created or destroyed. And on
another occasion he said everything came from one point, in the beginning.
So we are all flowers and rivers and trees. That was all of us together. Every one of the past, present, and future. — Derek Keck

A world of "if"s, but it would make no difference. If I could go back in time ... but I couldn't. The past was behind me. The best thing now would be to stop looking over my shoulder. It was time to forget the past and look to the present and future. — Darren Shan

And then I turned and saw a guy staring at me ...
"What are you looking at, idiot?" I asked, giving him the sneer that had served me so well.
"My future wife. The mother of my children. — Kristan Higgins

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

Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter. — Barack Obama

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

Eternity is not just looking to the future and our place with God in Heaven, but it is looking at our Eternity as if it were only moments away. — Beth Nimmo

They had a year of joy, twelve months of the strange heaven which the salmon know on beds of river shingle, under the gin-clear water. For twenty-four years they were guilty, but this first year was the only one which seemed like happiness. Looking back on it, when they were old, they did not remember that in this year it had ever rained or frozen. The four seasons were coloured like the edge of a rose petal for them. — T.H. White

My goal is to achieve a little less injustice in Uruguay, to help the most vulnerable and to leave behind a political way of thinking, a way of looking at the future that will be passed on and used to move forward. There's nothing short-term, no victory around the corner. I will not achieve paradise or anything like that. What I want is to fight for the common good to progress. Life slips by. The way to prolong it is for others to continue your work. — Jose Mujica

And on and on, and it all sounded completely, horribly plausible. Any one of a thousand options promised - basically guaranteed - a rich, fulfilling, challenging future for him. So why did Quentin feel like he was looking around frantically for another way out? Why was he still waiting for some grand adventure to come and find him? The professors Quentin talked to about it didn't seem concerned at all. They didn't get what the problem was. What should he do? Why, anything he wanted to! — Lev Grossman

Ultimately, we are all products of the experiences we have and the decisions we make as children, and it remains a peculiar detail of human condition that something as precious as the future is entrusted to us when we possess so little foresight. Perhaps that's what makes hindsight so intriguing. When you're young the future is a blank canvas, but looking back you are always able to see the big picture. — Simon Pegg

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

If you're planning on dropping out of high school, prepare yourself for the future by repeating aloud each day: I'm looking forward to low-paying jobs for the rest of my life. — Sean Covey

The future works out great men's destinies; The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever. — James Russell Lowell

People prone to joyful anticipation, skilled at obtaining pleasure from looking forward and imagining future happy events, are especially likely to be optimistic and to experience intense emotions. — Sonja Lyubomirsky

People often say to me - how clever you are! How brilliant to be able to go from ballet to theatre as you do. I answer that it is not clever at all. It is the gift of looking at oneself coolly, of calculating the future objectively. I could see the danger signals as far as ballet was concerned before anyone else did, that's all. — Robert Helpmann

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fantastic. It's volcanic and sexy and utterly unlike anything I've read before. It feels like the future in a dazzling way that has nothing to do with looking backward. It's been a long wait for a new novel from Mark Leyner, but worth it. Ten out of ten from me. — Douglas Coupland

Hope resides in the future, while perspective and wisdom are almost always found by looking to the past. — Greg Mortenson

he was seeing the eyes of youth looking at the future with no uncertainty or fear. — Ayn Rand

We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. — David Graeber

Looking for a great teacher who can tell you what will happen in the future? Ask the ancient ruins what will happen! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

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

You can't figure out what to do in the future by looking at how you did things in the past — Roger Lewin

Looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker ... the social instincts, - the prime principle of man's moral constitution - with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule, "As ye would that men should do to you; do ye to them likewise"; and this lies at the foundation of morality. — Charles Darwin

I NEVER LOOK BACK AT WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED BECAUSE I AM ALWAYS LOOKING AT THE FUTURE. I CAN LOOK BACK AT WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED WHEN I AM RETIRED - BUT UNTIL THEN IT IS ALL ABOUT FOCUS. — Lionel Messi

I can't see myself - I'm not really looking so far ahead in the future. I know that I kind of need to live in the country even though I'm not - my house isn't in the country right now. I bought a house, like a really tiny, cheap house in Wisconsin. — Justin Vernon

I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese. — Iain Banks

It's said that only gypsies have the true gift of looking at a person and seeing their future, so I was happy as a red hen when she said a man named Doyle would be loving me for the whole of my life and then some. — Bette Lee Crosby

Life's aim, if it has one, is to be always looking for temptations - and there are not nearly enough of them, I find. I sometimes pass the whole day without coming across a single one. It makes one so nervous about the future. — Gyles Brandreth

When ambition enters, creativity disappears - because an ambitious man cannot be creative, because an ambitious man cannot love any activity for its own sake. While he is painting he is looking ahead; he is thinking, 'When am I going to get a Nobel Prize?' When he is writing a novel, he is looking ahead. He is always in the future - and a creative person is always in the present. — Rajneesh

The common where we had walked the previous evening was a deserted tract of land, typical of Surrey, looking as if it might be miles from any habitation, while only a few deciduous trees divided it from country studded with bungalows. Some of the land showed traces of heath fires, charred roots and stones lying about on the blackened ground. Walking there was not at all like being in the country. Agriculture seemed as remote as in a London street. This waste land might have been some walled-in space in the suburbs where business men practised golfstrokes; or the corner of a cinema studio used for shooting wilderness scenes. It had neither memories of the past nor hope for the future. — Anthony Powell

Bravery isn't when you go looking for trouble; bravery is when trouble comes looking for you. — P.I. Barrington

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

And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die. — Peter Matthiessen

We are always looking to the future; the present does not satisfy us. Our ideal, whatever it may be, lies further on. — Ezra Hall Gillett