Henry David Thoreau Quotes

One of the basic lessons of history is that things can be different.

My house says to me, "do not leave me, for here dwells your past." And the road says to me, "Come and follow me, for I am your future." And I say to both my house and the road, "I have no past, nor have I a future. If I stay here, there is a going in my staying; and if I go there is a staying in my going. Only love and death change all things."

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

No one is wise at all times.

I am all for changing, even if mistakes are made in the process. Mistakes do not matter.

We have either to progress or to degenerate. Our ancestors did great things in the past, but we have to grow into a fuller life and march beyond even their great achievements.

We make the future better than the past. We don't hide from history. We make history.

If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.

For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment

Things will be far worse than they are now. And far better. I wait.

There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward-toward what?

The past is closed and limited; the future is open and free.

What I've done in the past is history and what I'm gonna do in the future is a mystery

Even the best intentions turn around one day... Nobody's right all the time.

The Times are the masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future.

I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

The future is usually just like the past- right up to the moment when it isn't.

And while the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it's seems, It would be easier sometimes to change the past.

There are thousands of years in the past, and there is an unknown amount of time in the future. There are all kinds of opportunities, and there are all kinds of dangers.

When there's a pattern of mistakes, something has got to change.

The future is always scary to those who cling to the past.

We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly into the future, but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.

I hope that something better comes along.