The Golden Man (1954)
Context: "He can look ahead. See what's coming. He can — prethink. Let's call it that. He can see into the future. Probably he doesn't perceive it as the future."
"No," Anita said thoughtfully. "It would seem like the present. He has a broader present. But his present lies ahead, not back. Our present is related to the past. Only the past is certain, to us. To him, the future is certain. And he probably doesn't remember the past, any more than any animal remembers what happened."
"As he develops," Baines said, "as his race evolves, it'll probably expand its ability to prethink. Instead of ten minutes, thirty minutes. Then an hour. A day. A year. Eventually they'll be able to keep ahead a whole lifetime. Each one of them will live in a solid, unchanging world. There'll be no variables, no uncertainty. No motion! They won't have anything to fear. Their world will be perfectly static, a solid block of matter."
"And when death comes," Anita said, "they'll accept it. There won't be any struggle; to them, it'll already have happened."
“The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.”
Source: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
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Yukio Mishima 60
Japanese author 1925–1970Related quotes
Variant: Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
On Eagle's Wings, 1977, p. 159
As of a Trumpet, On Eagle's Wings
p. 5809 http://www.lordmeher.org/index.jsp?pageBase=page.jsp&nextPage=5809
Lord Meher (1986)
Variant: Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.
(1834-1) (Vol.40) The Future, compare Ethel Churchill (or The Two Brides) I, 31
The Monthly Magazine
Speech to a joint session of the Dail and the Seanad, Dublin, Ireland (28 June 1963)
1963