Edmund Burke Quotes

You can take as much as you can from the generation that has preceded you, but then it's up to you to make something new.

I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.

We are all part of a tradition, at least we depend on the past.

Empires dissolve and peoples disappear, song passes not away.

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

You can't build a future if you don't have a past.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

You can see things growing up, be inspired by things. Just because they're not around anymore doesn't mean that you can't take those inspirations and bring them to life and bring them to the next generation.

Tradition matters. To me it's not a limiting force; it's a springboard.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

I imagine the earth when I am no more: Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

All the best things and treasures of this world are not to be produced by each generation for itself; but we are all intended, not to carve our work in snow that will melt, but each and all of us to be continually rolling a great white gathering snow-ball, higher and higher, larger and larger, along the Alps of human power.

Tradition lives because young people come along who catch its romance and add new glories to it.

Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye, but the dance lives on.

My goal... not to go back to Rembrandt... but to bring the great tradition and whatever is great about it, up to date.

We are the heirs of the ages

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

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.

It takes a lifetime to build tradition.

They say that art should stand the test of time. Life lasts a limited amount of time. Mountains and trees and earth will outlive human beings, but we don't know if they will be here always. Art does outlast the life span of its maker. Art should communicate to an increasing circle of strangers-people who do not know the artist, but come to know the work, and through the work, come to know something about the humanity of the artist that rings with their own humanity.

Blest be the art that can immortalize,--the art that baffles time's tyrannic claim to quench it.

Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle.

Lee was very much his own person so it's impossible to know quite what he would have thought but part of the reason for me staying is that I believe he always wanted this to be a house that would be here forever, that he never wanted his name not to mean anything any more. And I want that too. I want Alexander McQueen to continue. Then, in a hundred years time, there will still be this house that he created, this great place that represents modernity and creativity and beauty and romance and all of those things. That, I think, would be amazing.

When I am asked what I believe in, I say that I believe in architecture. Architecture is the mother of the arts. I like to believe that architecture connects the present with the past and the tangible with the intangible.