Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.

Civilizations are not remembered by their business people, their bankers or lawyers. They're remembered by the arts.

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

It may not be art, but it is history.

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

Presidents live and work in a house of history. They dwell with ghosts. Present power and the weight of the past are ambient realities of daily life in the presidency, and the two are intimately connected.

High tech is for a short time. But art is forever. People still admire a Picasso or a Van Gogh. But they don't admire the steam locomotive anymore.

Tradition matters. To me it's not a limiting force; it's a springboard.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

All passes, Art alone Enduring stays to us; The Bust out-lasts the throne,-- The coin, Tiberius.

The past is more than a memory.

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place.

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

Life is short and art is long.

I am not taking away the historical legacy, but it should not become a burden.

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!

Every leap forward that I make is by reaching back and firmly getting a footing in the past, and pushing forward as hard as I can.

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.

History is remembered by its art, not its war machines.

Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.

What's interesting to me, is a moving someone through time; in a way, history is part of my landscape. And it fascinates me that history can be so easily reflected in what happens today.