Jack Kerouac Quotes

I have come too late into a world too old.

You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.

Almost anybody from the past will hold views discordant with the present.

The world was made before English language, and seemingly upon a different design.

A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,"Was there ever such a world?"

Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted.

Five-hundred years ago people were saying in manuscripts, "Can you believe these kids today?" They were saying that same phrase everyone says now. No one can believe the youth and what they're doing and how culture is going and how it might fall apart.

I’m a big fan of history—applying the lessons as well as the joys and sadness. If we pay attention, we would see how we affect each other. In terms of time, we are not that far from one another. If we were to look back a century, it would seem like a long time; but, if we look at it by decades then it’s only 10 years, and by generations it’s only five.

Historical knowledge is indispensable for those who want to build a better world

Western Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.

To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language.

You tend to think that your time is either the best or the worst, and then when you have a sense of history, you'll realize actually, no, there were times things were quite gusty in the world. I mean, just think, nowadays most people will say they support the advancement of women, woman has been equal, the fact that we're so aware of the gustiness, in a sense, also speaks about the heightening of our own sensitivity.

This is our world now, and those ancient people are dead.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

We sift reality through screens composed of ideas . (And such ideas have their roots in older ideas.) Such idea systems are necessarily limited by language , by the ways we can describe them. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts move. If we seek new validity forms (other laws and other orders) we must step outside language.

No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor, but honest.

Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.

All language is but a poor translation.

Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality).

Maybe my biggest aim is to bring a sense of that old mystery of rock 'n' roll into the new age of today's instantaneous and fast world.

The arts, it has been said, cannot change the world, but they may change human beings who might change the world.

Leadership of a world-economy is an experience of power which may blind the victor to the march of history.

I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.

There's the generation that made the rules, the generation that codified them. The generation that broke them - that's mine. The generation that laughed at them - that's Tarantino's. And now there's a generation that doesn't know that there were any.

I'm afraid our old world has come to an end, Rilla. We've got to face the fact. (Walter)