To understand what a person is, it is necessary always to refer to what he may be in the future, for every state of the person is pointed in the direction of future possibilities.
~ Gordon W. Allport
Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them.
Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better and better problems.
People it seems, are busy leading their lives into the future, whereas psychology, for the most part, is busy tracing them into the past.