“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead…We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.”
Quote from Screwtape, the senior demon, from his letter letter to junior temptor, Wormwood, in C.S. Lewis’ epistolary masterpiece, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 1996) 76, 78.