We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit.
David SuzukiRead
The future doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we're the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The future is a construct of our imagination; we can only act in the present to shape what is to come.
David Suzuki's quote emphasizes the importance of the present moment and our memories of the past. He suggests that while the concept of the future is an invention of human thought, it empowers us to take actions in the present that can influence the outcomes of what lies ahead. This perspective encourages mindfulness and responsibility in how we live today.
Themes
FuturePresentMemoryActionMindfulness
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech, when encouraging people to focus on their actions today to achieve their long-term goals.
More from David Suzuki
All quotes βAs parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts we need to start getting out into nature with the young people in our lives. Families play a key role in getting kids outside.
David SuzukiRead
One of the joys of being a grandparent is getting to see the world again through the eyes of a child.
David SuzukiRead
The medical literature tells us that the most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and many more problems are through healthy diet and exercise. Our bodies have evolved to move, yet we now use the energy in oil instead of muscles to do our work.
David SuzukiRead
Do you know how much land is under ice, rock and snow? Do you know why 90 percent of us live within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border? We have this idea we're a vast country. But the reality is that a lot of it, a huge amount, is uninhabitable.
David SuzukiRead
We no longer see the world as a single entity. We've moved to cities and we think the economy is what gives us our life, that if the economy is strong we can afford garbage collection and sewage disposal and fresh food and water and electricity. We go through life thinking that money is the key to having whatever we want, without regard to what it does to the rest of the world.
David SuzukiRead
Similar quotes
And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality.
Martin Luther King, Jr.Read
Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity; and let us put aside all selfishness in consideration of language, nationality, or religion.
John Amos ComeniusRead
We might sometimes reflect and recall that the purpose of all our science, technology, industry, manufacturing, commerce, and finance is celebration, planetary celebration. This is what moves the stars through the heavens and the earth through its seasons. The final norm of judgment concerning the success or failure of our technologies is the extent to which they enable us to participate more fully in this grand festival.
Thomas BerryRead
But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him desolate!) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed, Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed.
Edgar Allan PoeRead
War has been avoided from a due sense of the miseries, and the demoralization it produces, and of the superior blessings of a state of peace and friendship with all mankind.
Thomas JeffersonRead
New York... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
Roland BarthesRead