Foretelling the Future Quotes

Prophecy and prescience - How can they be put to the test in the face of unanswered questions? Consider: How much is actual prediction and how much is the prophet shaping the future to fit the prophecy? What are the harmonics inherent in the act of prophecy? Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, a fault or cleavage that he may shatter with words or decisions as a diamond-cutter shatters his gem with a blow of the knife?

I wonder that a soothsayer doesn't laugh whenever he sees another soothsayer.

You see, Aslan didn't tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do. That fellow will be the death of us once he's up, I shouldn't wonder. But that doesn't let us off following the signs. - The Silver Chair

The only thing I hate worse than prophecy is self-fulfilling prophecy

In hindsight, I realized I could see into the future. Which is kind of like having premonitions of flashbacks.

The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god.

As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.

We desperately need seers who can see through the mist- Christian leaders with prophetic vision. Unless they come soon it will be too late for this generation. And if they do come we will no doubt crucify a few of them in the name of our worldly orthodoxy.

It is no very good symptom, either of nations or individuals, that they deal much in vaticination. Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them; and wise men also, for its duties engage them. Our grand business undoubtedly is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand.

I never make predictions and I never will.

Reason deserves to be called a prophet; for in showing us the consequence and effect of our actions in the present, does it not tell us what the future will be?

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

Prophecy is most dangerous when you try to make it happen... The Pattern weaves itself around you, but when you try to weave it, even you cannot hold it.

Can you picture my prophecy?

I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.

If a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world unfold just so upon its course and those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altogether and then where stands the sorcerer? Where the dreamer and his dream?

As everyone knows, the ancients before Aristotle did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind, but a divine inspiration, and in ancient times the two antagonistic streams, which one finds throughout in the estimates of dream life, were already noticeable. They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction.