Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

The older they get, the better they were when they were younger.

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

He who travels much has this advantage over others – that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage – that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

I never take pictures. Skies are much larger in reminiscences and my friends are much better-looking. Photos crop reality into little squares; instead, I have very good binoculars.

Why does the past look so enticing to us? For the same reason why from a distance a meadow with flowers looks like a flower bed.

Everything looks more beautiful in retrospect.

The world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

The older I get, the better I used to be.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

Age, like distance lends a double charm.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Every play I write is about love and distance. And time. And from that we can get things like history.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

When you live far away, home looks a little different every time.

It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.