Nadia Boulanger Quotes

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

Change does not change tradition, it strengthens it. Change is a challenge and anopportunity, not a threat.

We never leave our roots. We just grow new branches.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

There is no new world that you make without the old world.

With smoking axle hot with speed, with steeds of fire and steam, Wide-waked To-day leaves Yesterday behind him like a dream. Still, from the hurrying train of Life, fly backward far and fast The milestones of the fathers, the landmarks of the past. But human hearts remain unchanged: the sorrow and the sin, The loves and hopes and fears of old, are to our own akin; And if, in tales our fathers told, the songs our mothers sung, Tradition wears a snowy beard, Romance is always young.

When you talk about change, you know what makes it really tough for people is on the one hand you've got tradition, and on the other hand you've got change; in many people's mind, change equals modernization. Tradition, however. I'm a big tradition guy.

Tradition can, to be sure, participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself.

One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.

Tradition means taking account of a wonderful history but remembering that everybody today looks to the future.

Building the future holds more attraction than ancestor worship, whichever ancestor we're talking about.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

Tradition is the illusion of permanance.

The world changes, but I want that change to be necessary or respectful of what has happened before. Everything changes, and that's quite right.

Slumber not in the tents of your fathers. The world is advancing.

Everything evolves, not just music.

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

I do think evolution is an important aspect of keeping a tradition alive. If it freezes and remains very static in its form, it dies, and so a natural evolution has to occur.

We need the rock of the past under our feet in order to spring forward into the future.

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

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

Tradition, if not constantly recreated, can be as much a millstone as a mill-wheel.

We emphasize that we believe in change because we were born of it, we have lived by it, we prospered and grew great by it. So the status quo has never been our god, and we ask no one else to bow down before it.

The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Success cannot come from standstill men. Methods change and men must change with them.