Building on the Past Quotes

Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we've ever known.

Take advantage of the years of pioneering efforts. You might find this boring, as the young want to rush head on, as it were.

Everything is derivative. Everything is a remix, and we all stand on the shoulders of giants - a great phrase.

All experiment is made on a basis of tradition; all tradition is the crystallization of experiment.

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

Without a past you can't have a future.

Every student of science, even if he cannot start his journey where his predecessors left off, can at least travel their beaten track more quickly than they could while they were clearing the way: and so before his race is run, he comes to virgin forest and becomes himself a pioneer.

Each generation of scientists stands upon the shoulders of those who have gone before.

We have to go into the past to go further and further into the future.

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

You have to be very careful when you're working on a sequel, because it has to be a continuation of what you did before.

Transferring successfully to the next generation means producing work that's as good as or better than the work of the first generation that founded the agency.

One kind of artist is always striving to annihilate the past, to make the world anew in each new work, and so to triumph over the dead weight of routine. I am the other kind... who only sees his way forward by standing on the shoulders of those who have already cleared the path ahead.

I'll never be able to fill my father's or grandfather's shoes, but hopefully I can stand on their shoulders and reach farther.

Honour what is most beautiful about the past and build it into the promise of the future.

You always stand on the shoulders of your predecessor.

I start where the last man left off.

I am connected to the past in a way that keeps me going forward. Every leap forward that I make is by reaching back and firmly getting a footing in the past, and pushing forward as hard as I can.

Every generation that comes from this family has to do better than the last.

You might as well acknowledge what came before, because you can never do something wholly new. It's not unoriginal to make your references clear.

I have never had illusions about the value of my individual contribution! I realized early that what a man or a woman does is built on what those who have gone before have done, that its real value depends on making the matter in hand a little clearer, a little sounder for those who come after. Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain. One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.

Anyone who writes anything on any subject is standing on the shoulders of 900 people who've come before you.

Every leap forward that I make is by reaching back and firmly getting a footing in the past, and pushing forward as hard as I can.

Every human essay must have defects. It will remain, therefore, to those now coming on the stage of public affairs, to perfect what has been so well begun by those going off it