Enduring Relevance Quotes

I sensed that Confucius is an interesting character. This is someone who lived over 2,500 years ago and is still speaking to us. That people are still reading and repeating what he said so long ago is something I find quite fascinating.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

A man is not necessarily a master because he happened to compose two or three centuries ago. Let us beware of the worship of mere antiquity.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit, in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by anything short- livedor local, but abode by real and abiding traits.

I'm not really sure what makes a book a 'classic' to begin with, but I think it has to be at least fifty years old and some person or animal has to die at the end.

... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

The Beatles kind of pervade everything. They're always kind of part of everyone's lives.

A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch.

Time can take nothing from the BIBLE. It is the living monitor. Like the sun, it is the same in its light and influence to man this day which it was years ago. It can meet every present inquiry and console every present loss

Shakespeare doesn't belong to the past. If his material is valid, it is valid now. It's like coal. The only meaningfulness of a piece of coal starts and finishes with its combustion, giving us light and heat. And that to me is Shakespeare.

World War II proved a hypothesis that Alexis de Tocqueville advanced a century before: the war-fighting potential of a democracy is at its greatest when war is most intense; at its weakest when war is most limited. This is a lesson with enduring relevance to our own times - and our own wars.

I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.

. . . what humanity most desperately needs is not the creation of new worlds but the recreation in terms of human comprehension of the world we have -- and it is for this reason that arts go on for generation to generation in spite of the fact that Phidias has already carved and Homer has already sung. The creation, we are informed, was accomplished in seven days with Sunday off, but the recreation will never be accomplished because it is always accomplished anew for each generation of living men.

My readers think that I write for the day because my writings are based on the day. So I shall have to wait until my writings are obsolete. Then they may acquire timeliness.

I'm not worried about no charts or how long it's been out. Our records never go away.

If somebody told me people would still care about our music 25 years ago, I would have thought they were crazy.

If [Bill Shawn] liked the piece, then he would run it. But he wanted the magazine to be something that was more than just a weekly event. And as a result you could pick up a New Yorker under him, as I mentioned before, a year from then or 10 years or 20 years and there would always be something worth reading in it.

If you don't put out material that's going to last, you're not going to last.

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

What's wonderful about Tolkien and Shakespeare is that they show up your own individual microscope. They're so infinitely vast. You can reinterpret them in so many ways. Each age will have its own resonance with Lord of the Rings.

The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.

I'd love to have a lifetime career. If you look at people like Bob Dylan or Neil Young, people who have been there forever and who still make relevant music that people want to listen to - that would be amazing. I hope to be able to do that. But above all else, I feel like I just want to be happy.