Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

The past does not equal the future.

There is no new world that you make without the old world.

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.

The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism: what is new is set over and against what is old, and it is this constant contrast that constitutes the continuity of tradition.

Sometimes what works 40 years ago doesn't work today.

Nothing is to come, and nothing past: But an eternal now, does always last.

Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

Tradition, by its very nature, includes continuous change.

Youth should not accept the old order if the world is to move on.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.

Every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up.

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

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.

Tradition simply means that we need to end what began well and continue what is worth continuing

I guess some things never change.

We cannot become what we need by remaining what we are.

If we fix on the old, we get stuck.

Whatever worked in the past, build on it; whatever didn't work in the past, break the chain that binds you to it.

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change.