Henry Luce Quotes

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

Our past, our present, and whatever remains of our future, absolutely depend on what we do now.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

We live in the present, we dream of the future and we learn eternal truths from the past.

The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the present.

To read is to voyage through time.

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

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 future started yesterday, and we're already late.

Wizard's Seventh Rule Life is the future, not the past.

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.

And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

Fancy rules over two thirds of the universe, the past, and future, while reality is confined to the present

You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it.

Life is the past, the present and the perhaps.

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

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 present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.

There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.

There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

Life is divided into three periods: that which has been, that which is, that which will be. Of these the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain.

The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past.