The problem about the future is that it keeps turning into the present.

If the present tries to sit in judgment on the past, it will lose the future.

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

If you’re constantly focusing on the future and pinning your happiness there, you’ll be chronically unhappy in the present.

our anticipation of the future gets in the way of our awareness of the present.

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past. (1954), p. 75

If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.

If we continue to hold on to a dream for something in the future, we lose the present moment. And if we lose the present, we lose everything.

To quarrel over the past is to lose the future.

The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.

The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.

Of this I am certain, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.