Lafcadio Hearn Quotes

The magic is over, but its effects will live forever.

Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

Yet when ancient forces stir, many things are woken.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.

One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.

A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea.

True leadership is measured by what happens after you die.

The shadows are deepening all around us. Now is the time when we must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way.

The visions we offer our children shape the future.

The main obstacle is the entrenched power of the legacy polluters.

When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire -- nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?

Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.

The light of the future casts the shadows of tomorrow.

Without resistance you can do nothing

Today, I don't believe in destiny. But I do believe in history...There's nothing more powerful than history.

Let the word and the legend go before you. Let the world go before you. Let your shadow grow. Let it grow hair on its face. Let it become dark. Given time, words may even enchant an enchanter.

I, for one, will be convinced that the Canada we know and love will be gone forever. But, then, Thucydides wrote that Themistocles' greatness lay in the fact that he realized Athens was not immortal. I think we have to realize that Canada is not immortal; but, if it is going to go, let it go with a bang rather than a whimper.

Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

One should conquer the world, not to enthrone a man, but an idea; for ideas exist forever.

A mighty stream of tendency.

While the nation that has dared to be great, that has had the will and the power to change the destiny of the ages, in the end must die, yet no less surely the nation that has played the part of the weakling must also die; and whereas the nation that has done nothing leaves nothing behind it, the nation that has done a great work really continues, though in changed form, to live forevermore.

We have become a force of nature.

Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they've got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?" "No, Matthew. What do they say?" "The king is dead, that's what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king.

Every noble life leaves the fibre of it interwoven forever in the work of the world.