Quotes About Future

I see good men performing wonderful deeds, smoking marijuana and feeding LSD to cops, telling fairytales about the future. Spectacular things, no doubt. But where? In the White House? On Wall Street? No. These wonderful things happen in tenement buildings, in the slums, in dying cities. Forgive me if I don't expect these, uh, these—great things—to change the course of history.

You mustn't take what I say as gospel because no one can second-guess the future.

Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action.

Change is the province of leaders. It is the work of leaders to inspire people to do things differently, to struggle against uncertain odds, and to persevere toward a misty image of a better future.

The domain of leaders is the future. The work of leaders is change. The most significant contribution leaders make is not to today's bottom line; it is to the long-term development of people and institutions so they can adapt, change, prosper, and grow.

Can you surrender to the future that God has in store for you?

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope."27

I would like to attend college in the future when I have time. I have always been interested in architecture, so perhaps I would pursue a degree in that or business.

Wilde: I wish I'd said that.Whistler: You will, Oscar, you will.

A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future possibility, but to control the future, to prevent it from altering the past. This is the finite player in the mode of seriousness with its dread of unpredictable consequence.

Properly speaking, life and death as such are rarely the stakes of a finite game. What one wins is a title; and when the loser of a finite game is declared dead to further play, it is equivalent to declaring that person utterly without title-a person to whom no attention whatsoever need be given. Death, in finite play, is the triumph of the past over the future, a condition in which no surprise is possible.

Where the finite player plays for immortality, the infinite player plays as a mortal. In infinite play one chooses to be mortal inasmuch as one always plays dramatically, that is, toward the open, toward the horizon, toward surprise, where nothing can be scripted. It is a kind of play that requires complete vulnerability. To the degree that one is protected against the future, one has established a boundary and no longer plays with but against others.

The intuitive principle here is that we cannot be justified in owning what we do not need to use or plan to use. One does not earn money simply to store it away where it will be protected from all possible future use.

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition. Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.

Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing.

Let us say that where the finite player plays to be powerful the infinite player plays with strength. A powerful person is one who brings the past to an outcome, settling all its unresolved issues. A strong person is one who carries the past into the future, showing that none of its issues is capable of resolution.

Power is concerned with what has already happened; strength with what has yet to happen.

Early in a game time seems abundant, and there appears a greater freedom to develop future strategies. Late in a game, time is rapidly being consumed. As choices become more limited they become more important. Errors are more disastrous.

What is your future, and mine, becomes ours. We prepare each other for surprise.

The outcome of a finite game is the past waiting to happen. Whoever plays toward a certain outcome desires a particular past. By competing for a future prize, finite players compete for a prized past.

An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose of filling up a period of time with work, but for the purpose of filling work with time. Work is not an infinite player's way of passing time, but of engendering possibility. Work is not a way of arriving at a desired present and securing it against an unpredictable future, but of moving toward a future which itself has a future.

We are here in a physical world, with physical bodies, because that is exactly where God purposed us to be and where we shall be in the future.

For my part, I do not feel that the scheme of future happiness, which ought by rights to be in preparation for me, will be at all interfered with by my not meeting again the man I have in my. mind.

Maybe that's all she saw, the end of her suffering, the black, blank silence of the departed. No more bells, no more noises, no more voices and their terrible, disapproving faces. No past, no future, no more sad todays. No tomorrows.