Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.

The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

Nations and races change with the change of periods and the passage of time.

History takes time... History makes memory.

The Past is utterly indifferent to its worshippers.

… an old idea is not necessarily a good one — slavery is an old idea; so is polygamy.

. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.

All you got to do is look around. This country's getting worse and worse and more and more immoral, and we're rotting from within.

I just love learning about the past and everything we've been through as people and as a country.

Baseball is a game of tradition. It lives, in large measure, on its past.

I always had my roots in the past.

A miserable politics awaits us when the irreligious rot flows downstream.

Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption, also.

Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.

The past is more than a memory.

Thus is the fruit of the Earth taken, its flesh torn. Thus is it given over standing, toward rot. It is the principle of corruption, the death of what is, the birth of what is to be. You are wine.

The past is always knocking at the door, trying to break through into today.

Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We their sons are more worthless than they: so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.

It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.

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.

Everything is in a state of metamorphosis. Thou thyself art in everlasting change and in corruption to correspond; so is the whole universe.

The past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.

Like Spain, I am bound to the past.