Sufjan Stevens Quotes

When you're entrusted with a tradition, you've got to protect it.

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

Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has - the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge - infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.

I want to be a Cowboy for life.

I'm not sure I want to preserve the old ways just for the sake of saying, 'I don't believe in change.'

You can embrace nostalgia and history and tradition at the same time - it has to progress or it can't survive.

History is dependent on the new generation to write a new chapter.

It's good to be progressive, but don't shun the good things about tradition.

It's time to realise that tradition is fantastic but if because of tradition and only tradition you lose everyone it's less fantastic so you have to keep some tradition to this sport of course but you also have to live in your century.

I'm a storyteller. I do this for the next generations. They have to know what traditional alpinism is all about.

I like to make history.

I believe history and tradition is something solid and something we can rest on. I am not crazy about putting new spices in chocolate.

Each one of us is a custodian of India's well-being and of the legacy that we will pass on to coming generations.

We have received a heritage of craftsmanship, of aesthetics, of taste, of identity. Our brands have the beauty to preserve and perpetuate it.

The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.

The school has always been the most important means of transferring the wealth of tradition from one generation to the next. This applies today in an even higher degree than in former times, for through modern development of economic life, the family

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

You can scare off a lot of cowboys just by looking mean, I guess.

Our roots are clinging, we shouldn't knock down so many old 'buildings.'

I don't try to tell the dancers exactly what a dance means before they do it.

The basis of national identity is to say, "This is authentic to me or my forebears," and is there even such a thing? How authentic is it to your life? Just because your grandfather did it, what does that have to do with you? If I say I'm working in the style of Rembrandt, so what? You can say it, but are you really? No, because when you try to literally copy a cultural artifact, you change it. It dissolves, and then who's looking at it? People who appreciate that kind of drawing, or people it means nothing to?

The library is not only a diary of the human race, but marks an act of faith in the continuity of humanity.

There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubble in amber.

Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.

Every dance I make is a dive into this well of ancient memory.