Apps

Notable quotes

“The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.”
— Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds (1996).
“It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half of the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.”
— Herodotus, The Histories, Book 7, Ch. 50.
“Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.”
— John Maynard Keynes, as quoted in Isms (2006) by Gregory Bergman, p. 105.
“We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight.”
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Section II The Misery of Man without God, 172 (1669).
“And now, at half-past ten o'clock, I hear the cockerels crow in Hubbard's barns, and morning is already anticipated. It is the feathered, wakeful thought in us that anticipates the following day.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Journals, July 11, 1851 (1838-1859).
“To anticipate & prevent disastrous contingencies would be the part of wisdom & patriotism.”
— George Washington, Letter to John Jay (15 August 1786).

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.