When the origin of remote peoples goes beyond history, our languages show themselves their oldest monuments

For myself I would say that more than the interest and uses of the study of Welsh as an adminicle of English philology, more than the practical linguist's desire to acquire a knowledge of Welsh for the enlargement of his experience, more even than the interest and worth of the literature, older and newer, that is preserved in it, these two things seem important: Welsh is of this soil, this island, the senior language of the men of Britain; and Welsh is beautiful.

Language is the archives of history ... Language is fossil poetry.

Lavondyss for you—for all of us—is what we are able to remember of ancient times…”

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

A nation is to be congratulated when it has many illustrious men in its history, to whom the people may look back with reverential love. Happy the people possessing among their dead a Washington, a Lincoln, a Grant. Each such name helps to hold the passing generations, with all their new problems and revolutionary impulses, in allegiance to the ideals of the past. One must believe that Westminster Abbey is a perpetual incentive to true patriotism; that beneath the constant influence of its noble monuments demagogues should not flourish. As one walks beneath those arches and reads the records of heroes who have died in various climes for England and mankind, of the statesmen and the authors who have for so many centuries been making the English language and ideas the most precious literary heritage of the world, one gets a profound impression of the solidity of English institutions, a firm confidence that widespread, deeply-penetrating roots will keep the English oak green for centuries to come.

There is an extra loss for a Welsh poet writing in English, and that is, the longing for Welsh, the secret language.. of all the centuries of speech and song.

Our laws, language, religion, politics, & manners are so deeply laid in English foundations, that we shall never cease to consider their history as a part of ours, and to study ours in that as it’s origin.

We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minutes we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter toward its doom. And at the same time the thought abruptly shot through me, with a joyful, startled amazement, that despite the decay and death of that language it had not been lost, that its youth, maturity, and downfall were preserved in our memory, in our knowledge of it and its history, and would survive and could at any time be reconstructed in the symbols and formulas of scholarship as well as in the recondite formulations of the Glass Bead Game.

Do not lose your reverence for the past; it is on the past that you must plant your foot firmly, if you wish to mount high in the future. You are not a race of savages who have no past to remember. You cannot dissever yourselves in a day from the associations and influences of a past which extends over at least five hundred centuries. You cannot annihilate in a day a past national existence which has survived the annihilation of hundreds of empires, of hundred systems of religion, and which has surveyed unconcerned the downfall and ruin of many kindred civilizations. I have to make my warning so emphatic because the general tendency of European scholars, who have so great an influence over you, is to decry your past history, to call for its virtual erasure from your memory, and to lead you in the opposite direction.

There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.

The wisdom of our ancestors.

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation's proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations.

We do not exactly know the sociological reason for reverence for the past; it may be rooted in tribal and family solidarity or in the endeavour of the privileged classes to base their privileges on heredity. However that may be, the feeling that what is old must be better is still so strong that art historians and archaeologists do not shrink even from historical falsification when attempting to prove that the style of art which appeals to them most is also the oldest.