"We cannot overstate our debt to the past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the present."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
IMPERIVM
"Dost thou not understand that there are two distinct forces in us, that of the soul and that of the body, that is, a movement and a regulator?"
~Jules Verne
IMPERIVM
"The contemplation of celestial things will make a man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he descends to human affairs."
~Cicero
IMPERIVM
"Be true to your old dreams so that our world will not lose hope."
~Ezra Pound
IMPERIVM
“Tradition is the everlasting memory of mankind; remembering the great lessons of its past, storing them up in the mind of man, until they become instinctive, even as the half-conscious knowledge of the beast is stored as a protection from danger.”
~George Robert Stirling Taylor
IMPERIVM
"Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
~William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
IMPERIVM
"We have been given so many excellences, so many skills, and a mind, moreover, which can penetrate anything with the force of its application, swifter than the stars whose courses, many centuries hence, it anticipates. And what a wealth of harvests we have, of riches, of treasures one piled up on top of the other. You may go round all creation and, finding nothing which in its entirety you would rather be, pick out from everything individual gifts which you would like to have – if you make a true judgment of Nature’s kindness, you must confess that you are her favourite. The fact is that we have been, and are, dearest to the immortal gods. They have bestowed the greatest honour possible on us by placing us next to them. Much we had given to us. We had no room for more."
~Seneca
IMPERIVM
"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil."
~Plato
IMPERIVM
"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere."
~G.K. Chesterton
IMPERIVM