Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

The past is all we know of the future.

How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past?

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

The wise form right judgment of the present from what is past.

But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.

By how much one man has more experience of things past, than another, by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him.

For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

The past gives great examples of what can happen in the future. It's always important to remember.

The past is what you take with you.

I can't predict the future.

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.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

One of my few shortcomings is that I can't predict the future.

I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

I only remember the future.

The only danger of knowing and thinking a lot about history, is that you will trip on something behind you. Be sure you also look ahead.

You, yesterday, did the usual things, just as any day, You don't know if it's worth remembering. You would prefer to remember, there lying in the half-darkness of the bedroom, not what has happened already but what is going to happen. In your half-darkness your eyes would prefer to look ahead, not behind, and they do not know how to foresee the past.

We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

Prudence is a presumption of the future, contracted from the experience of time past.

We live between two dense clouds; the forgetting of what was and the uncertainty of what will be.

It is bad enough to know the past; it would be intolerable to know the future.

Everyone must learn from the past.

A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys.

Imagination judges the future by the past, but concerns itself with the future more than with the past.

He who forgets will be destined to remember.