Lester Bowie Quotes

The past does not equal the future.

New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

When there is no turning back, then we should concern ourselves only with the best way of going forward.

Lead the ideas of your time and they will accompany and support you; fall behind them and they drag you along with them; oppose them and they will overwhelm you.

For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

In a business, you've got to move on.

Change is a great and horrible thing, and people love it or hate it at the same time. Without change, however, you just don't move.

I'd never choose to turn the clock back.

We must not be hampered by yesterday's myths in concentrating on today's needs.

A reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous state - that's never a possibility in my books. For me, everything's irreversible in the life of a society, as well as an individual's.

I always imagined that I would learn something each time that I would take to a new project, then I realized that each new project poses a completely different challenge.

I'm trying to always do new things because if you stay behind and fight the future, you are just going to be left behind.

What's happened has happened, so what can we do to make it better for tomorrow and the day after? That's why we're here.

There is always a time to move on.

We should not be afraid to go into a new era, to leave the old beyond.

I am not nostalgic about things. When you have a kind of improvement, I am not nostalgic about the past.

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator.

Too much we have lived in our history. We must live in the future.

You cannot rely upon what you have been taught. All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.

If we never do anything which has not been done before, we shall never get anywhere. The law will stand still whilst the rest of the world goes on; and that will be bad for both.

I don't live in the past. I don't play my old records for that reason. I make a statement, then move on to the next.

Many people repeat the past. I'm not interested. I prefer evolution.

We need to be able to answer not yesterday's challenges but to tomorrow's challenges.

Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.

I often say that research is a way of finding out what you are going to do when you can't keep on doing what you are doing now.