Wendell Phillips Quotes

The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim.

Prudence is a presumption of the future, contracted from the experience of time past.

Most people, after accomplishing something, use it over and over again like a gramophone record till it cracks, forgetting that the past is just the stuff with which to make more future.

We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.

Whatever worked in the past, build on it; whatever didn't work in the past, break the chain that binds you to it.

A strong plan of action will yield you quantum results and will ensure that you don’t fall into the familiar patterns of your past.

To say that you can 'have experience,' means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman

If you were to take the lessons and experiences you've acquired in the past one year, five years or 10 years and skillfully invest that into your future, how powerful would that be? Where would you find yourself at the end of the next year?

Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.

Past failures unlock future successes

A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.

Some experts advise what to do in accordance with the past, but the past flew away, and we have to reorient ourselves in the face of new dangers.

It's human nature to extrapolate the recent past into the future, but it's terrible that managements go along with this.

Even people capable of living in the past don't really know what the future holds.

We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.

We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our past selves.

There is maybe a cynicism because of my past as a writer.

The real difference between telling what happened and telling a story about what happened is that instead of being a victim of our past, we become master of it.

My philosophy, one of the biggest enemies of future success is past success, because you become complacent, you become risk averse, and that's one of the things we try to drive here, and this is fundamental to this philosophy, and that's in this component change, and also in value creation. That we need to drive creative destruction, not just incremental innovations, but innovations that will change the whole nature of the business.

Discomfort brings engagement and change. Discomfort means you're doing something that others were unlikely to do, because they're hiding out in the comfortable zone. When your uncomfortable actions lead to success, the organization rewards you and brings you back for more.

People seldom learn from the mistakes of others-not because they deny the value of the past, but because they are faced with new problems.

It's all a game, with new rules every season.

To build up a future, you have to know the past.

If you want respect for your past, it means that you have a problem with your present and even more with your future.