“Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.”

Source: Ghost Story

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 258

"Purely Personal Prejudices"
Strictly Personal (1953)

Variants: One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that past is no more than present memory . . . Another maintains that the universe is comparable to those code systems in which not all the symbols have meaning, and in which only that which happens every three hundredth night is true...
The history of the universe... is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
Context: One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.

Source: VII, 8 (Penguin Classics edition of Meditations, translated by Maxwell Staniforth)

Variant: People see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is and the future less resolved than it’ll be.

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.1 The Historical Roots of Christianity the Hebrew Prophets, p. 9