It is a mercy one cannot see the future. In that New York misery, present and to follow, had I known that some fifteen years later I should be my own master, living more or less “like a gentleman,” earning my livelihood, though a very bare one, by writing, I could never have faced what I did face. Any value that may have lain in the experiences would certainly have been missed, at any rate. If one knew that the future promised better things, there is no patience in human beings that could hold and wait for it; if, on the other hand, it promised worse, I have met no courage that could bear the present. Those who preach “live in the present only” have common sense on their side.

He too, it seemed, had come to believe that he could somehow escape history. That it was possible, and even desirable, to live in a perpetual present.

To get paid in the future, live in the future.

For many of us, the happiest future is one that's precisely like the past, except a little better

For a person who lives 100 years in the future, the present comes as no surprise.

Live for the present –’ I heard my parents’ old maxim in the back of my head ‘– and the future will look after itself.

Sam grew up to be both dutiful and willful, a boy who would say yes to avoid trouble but then do as he pleased.

"He will through life be master of himself and a happy man who from day to day can have said, "I have lived: tomorrow the Father may fill the sky with black clouds or with cloudless sunshine.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

He has learned that it is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.

It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.

Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future.

Sam followed [his father], loved him, listened to him talk. He believed deeply in luck, the old man, though he was careful never to say the word. He called it the shifty shadow of God. All his life he paid close attention to the movements of that shadow. He taught Sam to see it passing, feel it hovering, because he said it was those shifts that governed a man's life and it always paid to be ahead of the play. If the chill of its shade felt good, you went out to meet it like a droughted farmer goes out, arms wide, to greet the raincloud, but if you got that sick, queer feeling in your belly, you had to stay put and do nothing but breathe and there was a good chance it would pass you by. It was as though luck made choices, that it could think. If you greeted it, it came to you; if you shunned it, it backed away.