Quotes About Continuity

Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.

To have been accompanied on life's journey by the symbolic and monumental props of the gods has been a continuing and reassuring source of solitude. Such props quiet the inner voices that whisper about the inevitable end of life's drama.

If you leave the line, you leave a gap in the line

I wonder if it won't be the same with the children as it has been with us. No matter how long each one of them lives, won't their lives feel to them unfinished like ours, only just beginning? I wonder how far they will go. And then their children will grow up and it will be the same with them. Unfinished lives. Oh, dearie, what children all of us are.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be. . .and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, SEE, this is new It hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things.

Wheels keep on turning and turning and turning And nothing's disturbing the way they go around.

He was not merely a chip of the old block, but the old block itself.

History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.

No debería preocuparme por lo que ahora acontece. Pues cada instante niega el anterior, y la ilusión de continuidad es lo que llamamos tiempo. Que luego se convierte en sueños o recuerdos.

Ninguno de mis días estaba escrito en el día anterior, pero lo que me impacta es que, una vez vivido, cada día antecede y explica y establece y justifica y condiciona lo que sucederá después, con los días venideros

Everything in life stands on what has gone before. You do this or that because, at the moment, it seems what to do. You are faced with this or that because of what happened somewhere earlier in your journey of life. What happened earlier depends on what went before that. Who would dispute that nobody stands in a void or a vacuum?

It keeps going, and going, and going . . .

While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Time is that quality of nature which keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn't seem to be working.

Mentalizing is a key skill because our sense of personal continuity is dependent on envisioning the thoughts and feelings we had in the past and how these relate to our current experiences, and because how we envision ourselves in the future is rarely in terms of physical attributes (after middle age, certainly) but rather in terms of projecting ourselves as a thinking and feeling person.

It is something that I discovered, a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, the orchestra doesn't stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful. And when I'm alone, it continues to play. There's a great repertoire, and it never ceases to play. That's what awakening is all about.

Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.

What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?

We are the bridge generations, the intermediaries, the ones who do the work so that our descendants will be ready.

A person's identity is not to be found in behavior...but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going

The past learns from the future, the future learns from the past. I already told you, we are the same five.

She's the only line of continuity running through the haphazardness of my life, even though there are times when I'm not even sure if I really know her.

History provides a sense of where we've been and lessons that can be taken forward.