Foreseeing Quotes

• Lovers are patient and know that the moon needs time to become full.

  Rumi

  Moon, Needs, Lovers

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• We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Inspirational, Peace, Women

  Marian Wright Edelman (1987). “Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change”, p.107, Harvard University Press

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• All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

  George Orwell

  Future, Past, Thinking

  George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1998). “The Complete Works of George Orwell: I have tried to tell the truth, 1943-1944”

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• It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all.

  Henri Poincare

  Absolute Certainty, Certainty, Foreseen

  The Foundations of Science Science and Hypothesis (p. 129)

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• In a world that is constantly changing, there is no one subject or set of subjects that will serve you for the foreseeable future, let alone for the rest of your life. The most important skill to acquire now is learning how to learn.

  John Naisbitt

  Life, Change, Future

  John Naisbitt (1988). “Re-Inventing the Corporation”, Random House Value Publishing

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• Patience is not sitting and waiting, it is foreseeing. It is looking at the thorn and seeing rose, looking at the night and seeing the day. Lovers are patient and know that the moon needs time to become full.

  Shams Tabrizi

  Moon, Night, Rose

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• God decreed to save and damn certain particular persons. This decree has its foundation in the foreknowledge of God, by which he knew from all eternity those individuals who would, through his preventing [going before] grace, believe, and, through his subsequent grace would persevere by which foreknowledge, he likewise knew those who would not believe and persevere.

  Jacobus Arminius

  God, Religious, Believe

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• The swan is not without cause dedicated to Apollo, because foreseeing his happiness in death, he dies with singing and pleasure.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Swans, Singing, Apollo

  "Tusculanarum Disputationum", I. 30, as quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 772-73,

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• Memory has many conveniences, and, among others, that of foreseeing things as they have afterwards happened.

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon

  Memories, Convenience, Happened

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1834). “Francesca Carrara”, p.299

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• The whole business is the crudest sort of stratagem, since we have no way of foreseeing it to the end. It is a mere paying out of rope on the chance that somewhere along the length of it will be a noose.

  Isaac Asimov

  Way, Rope, Chance

  Isaac Asimov (1991). “Great Tales of the Golden Age of Science Fiction”, Bbs Publishing Corporation

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• Sound economy is a sound understanding brought into action; it is calculation realized; it is the doctrine of proportion reduced to practice; it is foreseeing contingencies, and providing against them.

  Hannah More

  Practice, Understanding, Sound

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• Although the optimist may be a little giddy when foreseeing the future, telling himself that it will all work out in the end when that isn't always the case, his attitude is more fruitful since, in the hope of undertaking a hundred projects, followed up by diligent action, the optimist will end up completing fifty. Conversely, in limiting himself to undertake a mere ten, the pessimist might complete five at best and often fewer, since he'll devote little energy to a task he feels to be doomed from the start.

  Matthieu Ricard

  Attitude, Work Out, Energy

  Matthieu Ricard (2011). “The Art of Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill”, p.173, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Women particularly should concern themselves with peace because men by nature are more foolhardy and headstrong, and their overwhelming desire to avenge themselves prevents them from foreseeing the resulting dangers and terrors of war. But woman by nature is more gentle and circumspect. Therefore, if she has sufficient will and wisdom she can provide the best possible means to pacify man.

  Christine de Pizan

  War, Mean, Men

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• While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy.

  Timothy Keller

  Inspirational, God, Religious

  Timothy Keller (2013). “Walking with God through Pain and Suffering”, p.29, Penguin

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• Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes-circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result they marvel at the monster ball and wonder how the contriving of it came to be originally thought out and planned. Whereas there was no such planning, there was only a law: the ball once started, all the circumstances that happened to lie in its path would help to build it, in spite of themselves.

  Mark Twain

  Lying, Law, Knowing

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• And I saw that truly nothing happens by accident or luck, but everything by God's wise providence. If it seems to be accident or luck from our point of view, our blindness and lack of foreknowledge is the cause; for matters that have been in God's foreseeing wisdom since before time began befall us suddenly, all unawares; and so in our blindness and ignorance we say that this is accident or luck, but to our Lord God it is not so.

  Julian of Norwich

  Wise, Ignorance, Views

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• Almost all Christians being wretchedly enslaved to blindness and ignorance, which the priests are so far from preventing or removing, that they blacken the darkness, and promote the delusion: wisely foreseeing that the people (like cows, which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked), would part with less if they knew more.

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Christian, Ignorance, People

  Desiderius Erasmus (2016). “In Praise of Folly”, p.43, Desiderius Erasmus

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• Nature consists of facts and of regularities, and is in itself neither moral nor immoral. It is we who impose our standards upon nature, and who in this way introduce morals into the natural world, in spite the fact that we are part of this world. We are products of nature, but nature has made us together with our power of altering the world, of foreseeing and of planning for the future, and of making far-reaching decisions for which we are morally responsible. Yet, responsibility, decisions, enter the world of nature only with us

  Karl Popper

  Responsibility, Decision, Together

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• Two kinds of people are good at foreseeing danger: those who have learned at their own expense, and the clever people who learn a great deal at the expense of others.

  Baltasar Gracian

  Clever, Two, People

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• To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

  John Updike

  Animal, Frustrated, Suffering

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• A man's wits are better employed in bearing up under the misfortunes that lie upon him at present than in foreseeing those that may come upon him hereafter.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Lying, Future, Men

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