Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

A film like Genevieve to my contemporaries is not a film made years ago, but last week or last year. They see me as I was then, not as I am now. I am the reassurance that they have not changed. In an upside down world, with all the rules being rewritten as the game goes on and spectators invading the pitch, it is good to feel that some things and some people seem to stay just as they were.

Change is no threat to culture.

Tradition is the illusion of permanance.

We want traditional change—not transformational change.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone, you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change.

It is nice in France they adapt themselves to everything slowly they change completely but all the time they know that they are as they were.

No matter when you had been to this spot before, a thousand years ago or a hundred thousand years ago, or if you came back to it a million years from now, you would see some different things each time, but the scene would be generally the same.

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

In the great and deep qualities of mind, heart, and soul, there is no change. Homer and Solomon speak to the same nature in man that is reached by Shakespeare and Lincoln. but in the accidents, the surroundings, the change is vast. All things now are mobile--movable.

Whatever people are doing, they're probably going to be doing it five years from now. You have your banker, your general store runner, the principal of the school, and things of that sort. It's nice to see that, and to get old with other people.

England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same.

Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.

With smoking axle hot with speed, with steeds of fire and steam, Wide-waked To-day leaves Yesterday behind him like a dream. Still, from the hurrying train of Life, fly backward far and fast The milestones of the fathers, the landmarks of the past. But human hearts remain unchanged: the sorrow and the sin, The loves and hopes and fears of old, are to our own akin; And if, in tales our fathers told, the songs our mothers sung, Tradition wears a snowy beard, Romance is always young.

That's sort of overkill. We've had 70 years of the Ryder Cup, and it's gotten along just fine. The pendulum will swing back without making a monumental thing about it.

Life should be all about change. But some things shouldn't change. And my three-piece suits are one of those things.

We need the rock of the past under our feet in order to spring forward into the future.

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.

A lot of things change and a lot of things stay the same, they mostly stay the same.

I adore tradition. I cannot stand habit. Simply to repeat is nothing, also to destroy is nothing. Tradition is never interrupted, we are always evolving but never interrupted.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

The wind is old, but it keeps blowing.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.

I'm all for prosperity. It's change I object to.

For some strange reason, we believe that anyone who lived before we were born was in some peculiar way a different kind of human being from any we have come in contact with in our own lifetime. This concept must be changed; we must realize in our bones that almost everything in time and history has changed except the human being.