101 Future-Inspired Quotes

In a world that is constantly evolving, our dreams and aspirations often propel us forward, guiding us toward a brighter and more innovative future. The power of a well-crafted quote can be a source of inspiration and motivation, illuminating the path ahead with wisdom and optimism. Whether you're seeking encouragement for personal growth, professional ambitions, or simply a fresh perspective to kickstart your journey, this curated collection of the top 101 future-inspired quotes is here to ignite your imagination. Join us as we explore the words of visionaries, thought leaders, and pioneers who have paved the way for a future filled with endless possibilities.

1. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” - George Orwell

2. “Always remember that the future comes one day at a time.” - Dean Acheson

3. “The future depends on what you do today.” - Mahatma Gandhi

4. “Always choose the future over the past. What do we do now?” - Brian Tracy

5. “You have within you,right now,everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.” - Brian Tracy

6. “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” - Mother Theresa

7. “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” - Albert Einstein

8. “The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses 'the means at hand,' that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous—and so forth. There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been said that bricolage is critical language itself…If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur.” - Jacques Derrida

9. “If we can't alter the tide of events, at least we can be nearby with towels to mop up.” - Peter David

10. “When I read that the flash came, and I took a sheet of paper. . .and I wrote on it: I, Emily Byrd Starr, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the Alpine Path and write my name on the scroll of fame.” - Lucy Maud Montgomery

11. “No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.” - Sigmund Freud

12. “Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.” - Kathleen Norris

13. “Today will die tomorrow.” - Algernon Charles Swinburne

14. “Menacing lines of black tomorrows on the horizon.” - Joris-Karl Huysmans

15. “The world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. We’re lucky to be living now.” - Gustave Flaubert

16. “She sees things — things that might happen, things that are coming. But it’s very subjective. The future isn’t set in stone. Things change.” - Stephenie Meyer

17. “Its more fun to think of the future than dwell on the past.” - Sara Shepard

18. “As long as he deceived himself about the truth, he could blame fortune and have confidence in the future. Now the clouds of madness were closing round his mind.” - Hermann Bahr

19. “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” - Roy Amara

20. “How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.” - St. Augustine of Hippo

21. “The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport. ” - zadie smith

22. “Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.Lies 2: Time is a straight line.Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...)Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.Lies 7: Reality is truth.” - Jeanette Winterson

23. “In racing, they say that your car goes where your eyes go. The driver who cannot tear his eyes away from the wall as he spins out of control will meet that wall; the driver who looks down the track as he feels his tires break free will regain control of his vehicle.” - Garth Stein

24. “Do not despair, my friend. Today is theirs, but the future is ours” - Rodman Philbrick

25. “Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo.” - Wade Davis

26. “We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?” - Margaret Atwood

27. “Those who look behind will never see beyond.” - Sherry K. White

28. “It was a limitation of human consciousness: We live only in the future and past, we cannot perceive now. Now occupies no space, a hypothetical gap between future and past. Only an exceptional few could feel now athletes and jazzmen and, yes, thieves...” - William Landay

29. “[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.” - Milan Kundera

30. “The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.” - Barbara Taylor Bradford

31. “The NOW is such a magical moment that you have the time to live a magical life and have no time to have guilt of the past, worry of the future but to live now fully and unfold our magnificence with the help of Allah” - Muhaya Haji Mohamad

32. “There were certain moments upon which the whole of the future course of one's life might turn. And almost inevitably they popped out at one without any warning at all, leaving one with no time to consider or engage in a reasoned debate with oneself. One had to make a split second decision, and much depended upon it. Perhaps everything.” - Mary Balogh

33. “To some education is just a bore; to most education is food for the brain and enrichment for the present and future.” - Ana Monnar

34. “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

35. “When we put things off until some future-probably mythical-Laterland, we drag the past into the future. The burden of yesterday's incompletions is a heavy load to carry. Don't carry it.” - Peter McWilliams

36. “His wife spotted the danger in our resolutely bohemian ways. "You have only one year left before you qualify as a doctor and yet you're going away? You have no idea when you'll be back? But why?" We couldn't give precise answers to her desperate questions and this horrified her...” - Ernesto Che Guevara

37. “A very wise man once told me that you can't look back-you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.” - Jodi Picoult

38. “If I could somehow know the future, then now should not be like this time.” - Toba Beta

39. “She felt her future close upon her but unseen, like the sea behind the blowing veil of snow... She would follow Llyr's advice and face it a little every day...Day by day, step by step life would go forward. Eventually, the veil would lift, the cold would yield to the sun's warmth, and the world would be reborn. This dark time would pass.” - Nancy McKenzie

40. “As the future ripens in the past,so the past rots in the future --a terrible festival of dead leaves.” - Anna Akhmatova

41. “I aspired to be the better me of my future.” - Toba Beta

42. “General..behold the future of weaponry.""What the hell I am seeing here, Colonel?""It's..technologart of ancient weaponry, Sir!""It's..what?” - Toba Beta

43. “I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

44. “The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.” - Bruce Sterling

45. “I don't know where I'm going to be in three years. Because I have the feeling that the future is so full of possibilities, to stop being an actress, to do something else... for me, the future is just a huge bunch of discoveries.” - Audrey Tautou

46. “Our past cannot be changed, and to be preoccupied with it is inefficient in time and effort. Likewise, by fretting over the future, we only exhaust ourselves, making us less able to effectively respond when the future is actually upon us. By worrying about a mishap that may or may not take place, we’re forced to undergo the event twice—once when imagining it and once again if and when we actually experience it.” - H.E. Davey

47. “It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!” - Irvin D. Yalom

48. “Normal....What the majority of people look, act, and talk and like.So what if the majority became what we see as wierd now?Would our normal, become our new wierd?” - Catherine

49. “Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.” - Hermann Hesse

50. “Le passé et le présent sont deux statues incomplètes: l'une a été retirée toute mutilée du débris des âges, l'autre n'a pas encore reçu sa perfection de l'avenir.” - François-René de Chateaubriand

51. “To envision the future; you must forget the past and make the present a memory” - Jeremy Aldana

52. “When you make a choice, you change the future.” - Deepak Chopra

53. “It was amazing how you could get so far from where you'd planned, and yet find it was exactly were you needed to be.” - Sarah Dessen

54. “Everywhere I looked, demons of the future [were] on the battlegrounds of one’s emotional plane.” - David Bowie

55. “The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.” - John Green

56. “She was clean": no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?” - Jennifer Egan

57. “The future says:Dear mortals;I know you are busy with your colourful lives;I have no wish to waste the little time that remainsOn arguments and heated debates;But before I can appearPlease, close your eyes, sit stillAnd listen carefullyTo what I am about to say;I haven't happened yet, but I will.I can't pretend it's going to beBusiness as usual.Things are going to change.I'm going to be unrecognisable.Please, don't open your eyes, not yet.I'm not trying to frighten you.All I ask is that you think of meNot as a wish or a nightmare, but as a storyYou have to tell yourselves -Not with an endingIn which everyone lives happily ever after,Or a B-movie apocalypse,But maybe starting with the line'To be continued...'And see what happens next.Remember this; I am notWritten in stoneBut in time - So please don't shrug and sayWhat can we do?It's too late, etc, etc, etc.Dear mortals,You are such strange creaturesWith your greed and your kindness,And your hearts like broken toys;You carry fear with you everywhereLike a tiny godIn its box of shadows.You love festivals and musicAnd good food.You lie to yourselvesBecause you're afraid of the dark.But the truth is: you are in my handsAnd I am in yours.We are in this together,Face to face and eye to eye;We're made for each other.Now those of you who are still here;Open your eyes and tell me what you see.” - Nick Drake

58. “Past and future is determined by what is now…right now! This is why the present is a gift; the only one that ultimately matters most.” - T.F. Hodge

59. “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming” - David Bowie

60. “Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:Increasing efficiencyIncreasing opportunityIncreasing emergenceIncreasing complexityIncreasing diversityIncreasing specializationIncreasing ubiquityIncreasing freedomIncreasing mutualismIncreasing beautyIncreasing sentienceIncreasing structureIncreasing evolvability” - Kevin Kelly

61. “The past is bound to be fragmentary, bound to be reconstructed, bound to be reinvented. It serves only to collect the truths of today. If our present is the child of the past, our past is the child of the present. And the future will be the harvester of our bastard offspring.” - amin maalouf

62. “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

63. “Am I worried about the future? I don't know. When I think of the word it's like seeing a cavity, a space where a tooth used to be.” - Kirsty Eagar

64. “I wasn't used to looking ahead. Not like Jack. Maybe that was why he had that ready grin. I could see through the dust, but he could see through time, and he didn't even need magic to do it.” - Sarah Zettel

65. “Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

66. “Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and these many-coloured pigments of the imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them tallies with another!” - H. Rider Haggard

67. “When someone you love says goodbye you can stare long and hard at the door they closed and forget to see all the doors God has open in front of you.” - Shannon Alder

68. “So much American science fiction is parochial -- not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way...” - Poul Anderson

69. “O, het is met de verte als met de toekomst! Een wijd, schemerachtig vergezicht ligt voor ons, onze ziel en onze ogen drinken het in, en wij haken ernaar ons er helemaal aan over te geven, om in alle gelukzaligheid van één groot, heerlijk gevoel te zijn vervuld. Maar och, als we erop afvliegen, dan is alles zoals tevoren en staan wij in onze armoede, in onze beperktheid, en onze ziel dorst naar ontglipte lafenis.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

70. “Indeed, the future is signalled in the past, but time has to pass to see it. Art is the witness.BLOG post-Perpetual Beginning-November 14 2011” - Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox

71. “Your future is your own again. And I consider that to be a happy ending to the story.” - Lisa Mangum

72. “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” - George Orwell

73. “In his mind, Inman likened the swirling paths of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the random ways things fall against each other. It was simple enough to tell fortunes if a man dedicated himself to the idea that the future will inevitably be worse than the past and that time is a path leading nowhere but a place of deep and persistent threat. The way Inman saw it, if a thing like Fredericksburg was to be used as a marker of current position, then many years hence, at the rate we're going, we'll be eating one another raw.” - Charles Frazier

74. “Ideas define us, our past, our present, and most importantly, our future.” - P.W. Cross

75. “The most important thing is this: to sacrifice what you are now for what you can become tomorrow.” - Shannon Alder

76. “I'd like to see North America become a dry, sunny, sandy region inhabited mainly by lizards, buzzards and a modest human population - about 25 million would be plenty - of pastoralists and prospectors (prospecting for truth), gathering once a year in the ruins of ancient, mysterious cities for great ceremonies of music, art, dance, poetry, joy, faith and renewal. That's my dream of the American future. Like most such dreams, it will probably come true. That is why I'm still an optimist.” - Edward Abbey

77. “I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.” - Hugo Cabret

78. “If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.” - Blaise Pascal

79. “Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.” - Adam Johnson

80. “Wisdom's daughter walks alone—”“Ella!” Frank stood suddenly. “Maybe it's not the best time—”“The Mark of Athena burns through Rome,” Ella continued, cupping her hands over her ears and raising her voice. “Twins snuff out the angel's breath, Who holds the key to endless death. Giants' bane stands gold and pale, Won with pain from a woven jail.” - Rick Riordan

81. “In the world union, prosperity is a science, self-interest a new religion, peace is at hand and the future has never looked brighter.” - B. Barmanbek

82. “In post-modern finance, everybody took a risk when lending or borrowing.” - B. Barmanbek

83. “The past is set down in a thousand thousand indelible scrolls. But the future is a blank parchment forever in wait of a present.” - Andrew Levkoff

84. “Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.” - Vincent Van Gogh

85. “If we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.” - Neil Gaiman

86. “«Eliza opened her furry black satchel. She pulled out a portable CD player. “Gav, look here. Once, I loved this machine. Because it plays all my CDs. But nobody buys music in the stores any more! Even I don’t pay for music, and I’m rich! I’m carrying a zombie in my purse!”“Well, yes, that platform is obsolete now, but a new business model will arise for music.”“No it won’t! That’s a lie! Nobody will ever pay! The music business is the walking dead! Don’t lie to me.” Eliza stuffed her doomed device back in her furry purse.Gavin rubbed his chin. “Your Digital Native generation really has some issues.”»” - Bruce Sterling

87. “If I were the Devil . . . I mean, if I were the Prince of Darkness, I would of course, want to engulf the whole earth in darkness. I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree, so I should set about however necessary to take over the United States. I would begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” “Do as you please.” To the young, I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is “square”. In the ears of the young marrieds, I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be extreme in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct. And the old, I would teach to pray. I would teach them to say after me: “Our Father, which art in Washington” . . .If I were the devil, I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull an uninteresting. I’d threaten T.V. with dirtier movies and vice versa. And then, if I were the devil, I’d get organized. I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing and less work, because idle hands usually work for me. I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. And I’d tranquilize the rest with pills. If I were the devil, I would encourage schools to refine yound intellects but neglect to discipline emotions . . . let those run wild. I would designate an athiest to front for me before the highest courts in the land and I would get preachers to say “she’s right.” With flattery and promises of power, I could get the courts to rule what I construe as against God and in favor of pornography, and thus, I would evict God from the courthouse, and then from the school house, and then from the houses of Congress and then, in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion, and I would deify science because that way men would become smart enough to create super weapons but not wise enough to control them.If I were Satan, I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg, and the symbol of Christmas, a bottle. If I were the devil, I would take from those who have and I would give to those who wanted, until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. And then, my police state would force everybody back to work. Then, I could separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines, and objectors in slave camps. In other words, if I were Satan, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing.(Speech was broadcast by ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey on April 3, 1965)” - Paul Harvey

88. “Mattia's voice no longer stirred anything in his stomach, but he was aware of the idea of him and always would be, as the only true benchmark for everything that had come afterward.” - Paolo Giordano

89. “When you're about to die, your whole life's supposed to flash before your eyes. When you fall in true love, on the other hand, what you see in the twinkling of an eye is your entire future.” - Tom Holt

90. “The past is only making you to spill tears, tears of joy or tears pain. But anyway they are making you sad, for the things you had and will never have again.” - T.A

91. “Only the weak use "I can't" as an excuse to give up.” - T.A

92. “...it saddens me that she has to grow up and make friends with humans. I hear the future coming for her. Stomp, stomp, stomp.” - Catherine Austen

93. “Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn't happen right away.” - Haruki Murakami

94. “To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.” - Oliver Sacks

95. “Invest in your knowledge and future! Especially if you got kids, you don't want them going through life struggling trying to find jobs to survive and dealing with managers that don't know how to act because of their position, you don't want them to go through what you went through.... If you live day by day then you wont have something to look forward to." -Robert RiveraNew King James VersionProverbs 13:22- A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.” - Robert Rivera

96. “The only way for you to know that you can really make a change is by knowing the future.” - Toba Beta

97. “I was watching a collection of vintage '80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes.” - Ernest Cline

98. “But no matter what you do to postpone it, the future always shows up at your door.” - Cameron Dokey

99. “Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.” - Kate Atkinson

100. “A piece of information can change a person. I'd hate to change the way I'm supposed to live the future.” - Samantha Young

101. “The clock ticks; the taunting rhythm serving as a reminder that forward is the only way we can go. The mechanical heartbeat of the darkness, a cold ellipsis, punctuating years gone by. Arising unchained.No glorious hymn, just the steady beat of the illusion of time. We heal or we carry forward the weight of our wounds... To believe otherwise is the mendacity of desperation. Arising honestly. The miles behind are littered with the weight of nostalgia, but too many miles lay ahead us to carry the weight. In the end, even echoes fade away. Pen in hand...Arising to write the next chapter.(MU Articles 2013, Dedication to Joey)” - Shannon L. Alder