A Quote by Graham Swift

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

Graham Swift

Quote Topics

Future Image Imagined Lost Often Past Some Very Wish

Quote Author

Graham Swift
British - Author
Born: May 4, 1949

Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.

Michael Ignatieff

People long to go backward in their imagination as well as forward. We don't wish simply to exist forever in some future; we wish to have existed in some distant past.

Gloria Whelan

What you think of as they past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace -- and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is "borrowed" from the Now.

Eckhart Tolle

Be willing to dream, and imagine yourself becoming all that you wish to be. Keep in mind the basic axiom -- all that now exists was once imagined. It follows then that what you want to exist for you in the future must now be imagined.

Wayne Dyer

To be sure, the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish.

Sigmund Freud

Let's escape the past. The past didn't work. All we have is the future, and I'm the one who wrote "no future for you!" Don't let the irony be lost.

John Lydon

PAST, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance... The Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one - the knowledge and the dream.

Ambrose Bierce

Besides, whoever keeps the future in front of him and the past at his back is doing something else that's hard to imagine. For the image implies that events somehow already exist in the future, reach the present at a determined moment, and finally come to rest in the past. But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute. Therefore such a person has his face toward the void, whereas it is the past behind him that is visible, stored in the memory.

Harry Mulisch

A kiss is often about the future and the past. A lost dream, about the discretion of the idealism.

David Means

We need to start imagining the future or it will get imagined for us, and the ways that it has been imagined thus far don't seem very attractive.

Mohsin Hamid

Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past." "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.

George Orwell

Much education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth.

Alvin Toffler

I hate cameras. They interfere, they’re always in the way. I wish: if I could just work with my eyes alone. To get a satisfactory print, one that contains all that you intended, is very often more difficult and dangerous than the sitting itself. When I’m photographing, I immediately know when I’ve got the image I really want. But to get the image out of the camera and into the open, is another matter.

Richard Avedon

A man is as much affected pleasurably or painfully by the image of a thing past or future as by the image of a thing present.

Baruch Spinoza

In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.

Alan Moore

Fear is always the result of an unquestioned past imagined as a future.

Byron Katie

A Quote by Graham Swift

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors