I felt like I had made the mistake of asking a fortune-teller to look into my future, and now I was being punished for trying to look too far ahead.

Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward — your destiny — are here and now.

There is a danger of expecting the results of the future to be predicted from the past.

To look at the entire journey all at once was stupidity. You thought of it in segments; that was the only way.

It’s a good thing God doesn’t let you look a year or two into the future, or you might be sorely tempted to shoot yourself. But He’s a charitable Lord: He only lets you see one day at a time.

My mistake was to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a specific person. It was the error of thinking that Chloe, rather than love, was inevitable.

Like Steve Jobs said, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.” —

Toffler’s Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.

"The future many pursue is only a step ahead:
Get to work. Get to lunch. Get to the end of the day. Get to the weekend. Pay the bills.

When you’re engaged in short-term goals, [you're] like a hamster on a wheel: expending lots of energy, but not making progress.

To exit the rat race of [one-step-ahead] day-to-day mindset requires a shift in your focus. Begin thinking much bigger and further out. [Instead of asking yourself, "what am I doing after this task?" ask yourself:] Where could you be in five years?"

Caution seldom goes far enough.

From triumph to failure is only one step.

You can't really move forward until you look back.

[From Remaking America panel discussion at George Washington University]

People that worry about where they think they're going next generally don't end up where they think they're going. I just worry about what I'm doing now and try to make it good. When you've got too much of a master plan, it's going to fail.