Mikhail Bulgakov Quotes

Humans are terrible at predicting the future. We really overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term... If we can glimpse even a couple of years into the future, even that's difficult to do.

I refuse to say anything beyond five years because I don't think we can see much beyond five years.

How do Ferrari know what I'm doing next year when I don't know what I'm doing next week?

I find that predicting the course of our lives is like predicting the weather. You might be able to predict your future in the short term, but the longer you look ahead, the less likely you are to be correct.

Forecasting our futures is built into our psyches because we will soon have to manage that future. We have no choice. No matter how often we fail, we can never stop trying.

It's impossible for us to forecast what's going to happen ten years from now and make a decision today to say what we're going to do.

We are incredibly poor predictors of our future.

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.

We're so used to thinking in the short term, and the minute you speak in more long-term language then you tend to get dismissed as utopian and so on. We have a real problem here in making long-term thinking respectable

Foreseeing the future is always difficult.

The regulations keep on coming. And we are trying to make decisions that we will be happy with for decades.

It is easy to make plans in this world; even a cat can do it; and when one is out in those remote oceans it is noticeable that a cat's plans and a man's are worth about the same. There is much the same shrinkage in both, in the matter of values.

In order to be in control, you have to have a definite plan for at least a reasonable period of time. So how, may I ask, can man be in control if he can't even draw up a plan for a ridiculously short period of time, say, a thousand years, and is, moreover, unable to ensure his own safety for even the next day?

Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks they know where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.

Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy.

What if we knew what tomorrow would bring? Would we fix it? Could we?

No one ever thinks about what the hell is going to happen 25 years from now.

It's tough to say, exactly, what things will look like in three to five years, but there's a lot of work to do in just moving along the path that we've already set out.

I don't want to make promises, not knowing what the situation's going to be three or four years out.

A tiny change today brings us to a dramatically different tomorrow. There are grand rewards for those who pick the high hard roads, but those rewards are hidden by years. Every choice is made in the uncaring blind, no guarantees from the world around us.

When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute.

You can't just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can't plan the moment you lose your way in the first place.

We may have doubts, but we control the present. We always have the choice to move forward with hope and confidence.

The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.

Leuconoe, close the book of fate, For troubles are in store, . . . . Live today, tomorrow is not.