Parenting & Family Quote by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

A singer famous for giving words their full moral weight is, here, warning you off words entirely. Fischer-Dieskau’s line treats “the future” the way polite society once treated pregnancies and manuscripts: with a hush that’s half superstition, half discipline. The comparison is doing sly double duty. Unwritten books and unborn children aren’t just unknown; they’re fragile. Talking about them too soon turns them into performances for other people, vulnerable to envy, judgment, and the cheapening glare of anticipation. In that sense, the quote is less mystical than practical: protect what’s still forming by keeping it private.

Coming from a musician - and not just any musician, but a master of lieder where a single syllable can tilt an entire emotional world - the subtext is also about timing. You don’t “announce” a Schubert song before it’s sung; you let it arrive, fully breathed. The future, in this framing, isn’t a motivational poster to be narrated into existence. It’s rehearsal, craft, gestation.

There’s a cultural context, too: a 20th-century German artist shaped by upheaval, propaganda, and the catastrophic consequences of grand promises. Against that backdrop, refusing to talk about the future reads like an ethical stance: skepticism toward declarations, suspicion of the rhetoric that sells tomorrow while wrecking today. It’s restraint as a kind of artistry - and self-defense.