George Wald Quotes

Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

As I look down the path to the future I see before me the footprint of the hand of fate.

Optimism is a duty. The future is open. It is not predetermined. No one can predict it, except by chance. We all contribute to determining it by what we do. We are all equally responsible for its success.

It’s hard letting go in the past when there are no firm handholds in the future.

It is not wise to neglect the present for the future, for who knows what the future will be.

Nowadays, when a speaker tells the graduates that the future is theirs--is that a promise or a threat?

The future is uncertain, and therefore I can't predict it.

The future not being born, my friend, we will abstain from baptizing it.

When a society has doubts about its future, it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling.

People live for the morrow, because the day-after-to-morrow is doubtful.

What's the future of mankind? How do I know, I got left behind.

Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?

I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.

In my brief glimpse of what is to come I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I'm fairly relieved to say, it looks nothing like me.

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.

There's nothing as scary as the future.

To hope is to contradict the future.

From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.

You're making something that won't be what it is until some unknown date in the future. All aspects of the personal disappear.

What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

I know who I am, how I was. I don't want to know how I will be because nobody knows that.

When we speak of the morrow nothing is ever certain.