Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

Take hold of your future or the future will take hold of you

Why couldn't it have been done 2 years ago, and why will 2 years in the future be too late?

The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim.

Thoughtful people are concerned with the future because that is the only area of experience about which anything can be done. We cannot change the past, and the present is gone as soon as it is reported, but the future is that in which we can make a difference.

It’s for you to decide whether change is right for you right now. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But either way keep the growth mindset in your thoughts then when you bump up against obstacles you can turn to it, it will always be there for you showing you a path into the future.

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.

The politics of our society are a conversation in which past, present and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion properly prevail none permanently dominates, and on this account we are free.

At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future.

If you hesitate to map out your future, to make a big plan or to set a goal, you've just gone ahead and mapped your future anyway.

You have to keep being curious. The notion that the present is different than the past, and the future will be different than the present, and the present is past, as we say it. I think I, by nature, am an optimist. Maybe I was driven to escape from my childhood and to be something, create my own world or career the way I wanted it to be. And I keep doing that in very interesting ways.

Your current conditions are echoes of your past choices.

You should never fall in love with your own press clippings, because it is very much the nature of the beast that the same journalists who build you up between Monday and Friday tear you down for weekend fun...My family's habit of living in the past seems to me pathological, even dangerous. If all greatness lies in the past, what is the point of the future?

There’s no need for us to be held back by the past or how things have been so far. The important thing is what seeds we are sowing now for the future.

Tomorrow is another day. I've got plenty of things to worry about right now.

Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.

We must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.

You are always free to choose what you do with your life. To make changes in your future, make new choices today.

Every tomorrow is determined by every today.

Sometimes you simply made the wrong choice and you had to live with it. You could only change the future.

hindsight is not a strategy.

The past is a rich resource on which we can draw in order to make decisions for the future, but it does not dictate our choices. We should look back at the past and select what is good, and leave behind what is bad.

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

I go to my past in order to discern the future.

Your life~the way it looks today is a result of your choices...What will you choose today for your tomorrows?