A Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quote Topics

Age Biographies Builds Criticism Fathers Histories Our Retrospective Writes

Quote Author

Ralph Waldo Emerson
American - Philosopher
May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882

He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. - Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton

Bill Vaughan

It is not that fathers are better or worse, not that they are more loved or criticized, but rather that they are viewed with far less intensity. There is no Philip Roth or Woody Allen or Nancy Friday who writes about fathers with a runaway excess of humor, horror ... feeling. Most of us let our fathers off the hook.

Ellen Goodman

unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I personally believe that the writing of personal and family histories will do more to turn the hearts of the children to the fathers and the fathers to children than almost anything we can do

Hartman Rector, Jr.

In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults.

Charles J. Shields

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

Ben Elliot

I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times.

Alan Furst

Sin writes histories, goodness is silent.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our “fault.” But it is undeniably our inheritance.

Douglas A. Blackmon

In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

Edmund Burke

Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat.

Augustus William Hare

How strange it is that we of the present day are constantly praising that past age which our fathers abused, and as constantly abusing that present age, which our children will praise.

Charles Caleb Colton

As strange as this may sound, I very seldom read fiction. Because my novels require so much research, almost everything I read is non - fiction - histories, biographies, translations of ancient texts.

Dan Brown

Not only the priceless heritage of our fathers, of our seamen, of our Empire builders is being thrown away in a war that serves no British interests - but our alliance leader Stalin dreams of nothing but the destruction of that heritage of our fathers?